Enterprising Youth: Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature 020392844X, 0415961505, 9780415961509, 9780203928448, 2007042309

Citation preview

ENTERPRISING

YO U T H

Children’s Literature and Culture Jack Zipes, Series Editor Children’s Literature Comes of Age Toward a New Aesthetic by Maria Nikolajeva Sparing the Child Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature About Nazism and the Holocaust by Hamida Bosmajian Rediscoveries in Children’s Literature by Suzanne Rahn Inventing the Child Culture, Ideology, and the Story of Childhood by Joseph L. Zornado Regendering the School Story Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys by Beverly Lyon Clark A Necessary Fantasy? The Heroic Figure in Children’s Popular Culture edited by Dudley Jones and Tony Watkins White Supremacy in Children’s Literature Characterizations of African Americans, 1830–1900 by Donnarae MacCann Ways of Being Male Representing Masculinities in Children’s Literature and Film by John Stephens Retelling Stories, Framing Culture Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature by John Stephens and Robyn McCallum

The Case of Peter Rabbit Changing Conditions of Literature for Children by Margaret Mackey The Feminine Subject in Children’s Literature by Christine Wilkie-Stibbs Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction by Robyn McCallum Recycling Red Riding Hood by Sandra Beckett The Poetics of Childhood by Roni Natov Voices of the Other Children’s Literature and the Postcolonial Context edited by Roderick McGillis Narrating Africa George Henty and the Fiction of Empire by Mawuena Kossi Logan Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults edited by Naomi J. Miller Representing the Holocaust in Youth Literature by Lydia Kokkola Translating for Children by Riitta Oittinen Beatrix Potter Writing in Code by M. Daphne Kutzer Children’s Films History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory by Ian Wojcik-Andrews

Pinocchio Goes Postmodern Perils of a Puppet in the United States by Richard Wunderlich and Thomas J. Morrissey

Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults edited by Carrie Hintz and Elaine Ostry

Little Women and the Feminist Imagination Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays edited by Janice M. Alberghene and Beverly Lyon Clark

Transcending Boundaries Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults edited by Sandra L. Beckett

The Presence of the Past Memory, Heritage, and Childhood in Postwar Britain by Valerie Krips

The Making of the Modern Child Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century by Andrew O’Malley

How Picturebooks Work by Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott Brown Gold Milestones of African American Children’s Picture Books, 1845–2002 by Michelle H. Martin Russell Hoban/Forty Years Essays on His Writing for Children by Alida Allison Apartheid and Racism in South African Children’s Literature by Donnarae MacCann and Amadu Maddy Empire’s Children Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books by M. Daphne Kutzer Constructing the Canon of Children’s Literature Beyond Library Walls and Ivory Towers by Anne Lundin Youth of Darkest England Working Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire by Troy Boone Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre Literature for Children and Adults by Mike Cadden Twice-Told Children’s Tales edited by Betty Greenway Diana Wynne Jones The Fantastic Tradition and Children’s Literature by Farah Mendlesohn Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800 edited by Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore Voracious Children Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature by Carolyn Daniel National Character in South African Children’s Literature by Elwyn Jenkins Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mary Poppins The Governess as Provocateur by Georgia Grilli

A Critical History of French Children’s Literature by Penny Brown The Gothic in Children’s Literature Haunting the Borders edited by Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis Reading Victorian Schoolrooms Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction by Elizabeth Gargano Soon Come Home to This Island West Indians in British Children’s Literature by Karen Sands-O’Connor Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child by Annette Wannamaker Into the Closet Cross-dressing and the Gendered Body in Children’s Literature by Victoria Flanagan Russian Children’s Literature and Culture edited by Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova The Outside Child In and Out of the Book by Christine Wilkie-Stibbs Representing Africa in Children’s Literature Old and New Ways of Seeing by Vivian Yenika-Agbaw The Fantasy of Family Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal by Liz Thiel From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood Children’s Literature and the Construction of Canadian Identity by Elizabeth A. Galway The Family in English Children’s Literature by Ann Alston Enterprising Youth Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature edited by Monika Elbert

ENTERPRISING

YOUTH Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature

Edited by

MONIKA ELBERT

First published 2008 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 2008 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Enterprising youth: social values and acculturation in nineteenth-century American children’s literature / edited by Monika Elbert. p. cm.—(Children’s literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Children’s literature, American—History and criticism. 2. Children— Books and reading—United States—History—19th century 3. Social values in literature. 4. Children—United States—History—19th century. 5. Socialization—United States—History–19th century. I. Elbert, Monika M. (Monika Maria), 1956– PS490.E58 2008 810.9′3523—dc22 ISBN 0-203-92844-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-96150-5 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-92844-X (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-96150-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-92844-8 (ebk)

2007042309

To my parents, Paul and Maria Elbert, whose childhood stories by the Brothers Grimm and by Wilhelm Busch enthralled me

Frontispiece: From British Workwoman (1874). Reproduced from Carol Belanger Grafton, Children: A Pictorial Archive from Nineteenth-Century Sources (NY: Dover, 1978).

Contents

List of Figures

xiii

Series Editor’s Foreword

xv

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

xvii Part I Civic Duties and Moral Pitfalls

1

“A Just, A Useful Part”: Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Contributions to The Juvenile Miscellany and The Youth’s Companion Lorinda B. Cohoon

3

Charitable (Mis)givings and the Aesthetics of Poverty in Louisa May Alcott’s Christmas Stories Monika Elbert

19

“Hints Dropped Here and There”: Constructing Exclusion in St. Nicholas, Volume I Janet Gray and Melissa Fowler

39

“One extra little girl”: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Orphans Roxanne Harde

55

Part II Politicizing Children: “Normalization” and the Place of the Marginalized Child

67

“A is an Abolitionist”: The Anti-Slavery Alphabet and the Politics of Literacy Martha L. Sledge

69

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Contents

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Overcoming Racism in Jacob Abbott’s Stories of Rainbow and Lucky and in Antebellum America Jeannette Barnes Lessels and Eric Sterling

83

“I am your slave for love”: Race, Sentimentality, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Fiction for Children Lesley Ginsberg

97

Shut-ins, Shut-outs, and Spofford’s Other Children: The Hester Stanley Stories Rita Bode

115

Part III Sentimental and Realistic Constructs of Childhood

131

Robinson Crusoe and the Shaping of Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century America Shawn Thomson

133

“The cleverest children’s book written here”: Elizabeth Stoddard’s Lolly Dinks’s Doings and the Subversion of Social Conventions Maria Holmgren Troy

149

A Sentimental Childhood: The Unlikely Memoirs of Realist-Era Writers Melanie Dawson

165

The Cultural Work of Kate Douglas Wiggin: Cultivating the Child’s Garden Anne Lundin

179

Part IV Education and Shifting Paradigms of the Child’s Mind

195

“Heroes of the Laboratory and the Workshop”: Invention and Technology in Books for Children, 1850–1900 Eric S. Hintz

197

Natural History for Children and the Agassiz Association J.D. Stahl

213

Contents

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

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Good Masters: Child–Animal Relationships in the Writings of Mark Twain and G. Stanley Hall Joan Menefee

227

Child Consciousness in the American Novel: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), What Maisie Knew (1897), and the Birth of Child Psychology Holly Blackford

245

Contributors

259

Bibliography

263

Index

279

List of Figures

Frontispiece From British Workwoman (1874). Figure P I

Figure 3.1:

From the nineteenth-century children’s periodical Chatterbox (1884–99).

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1

From St. Nicholas: Illustration accompanying Alcott, “Roses and Forget-Me-Nots” “Lizzie Knelt Down to Arrange the Airy Skirt.”

48

From St. Nicholas: “Jim Crow”—“Examining the Pocket-Book.”

52

From St. Nicholas: “Jim Crow”—“Jim with Ink and Books.”

52

From the nineteenth-century children’s periodical Chatterbox (1884–99).

67

Figure: 6.1:

“The Lucky Escape,” Frontispiece, Selling Lucky.

86

Figure 7.1:

June watching “Massa Linkum.”

108

Figure 7.2:

S[tephens], H[enry] I. “Plucking Live Geese Feathers.”

110

Figure 7.3:

“How Would You Like It?/‘Come, you must have your ears clipped.’” Hearth and Home.

111

“Put Yourself in his Place/‘We’ve caught the fellow at last.’” Hearth and Home.

112

“Bella and Charlotte and I, after Everyone’s Asleep Tonight,” Hester Stanley At St. Marks.

122

Figure 3.2:

Figure 3.3:

Figure P II:

Figure 7.4:

Figure 8.1:

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Figure 8.2:

“Hester Was in the Sea and Had Reached the Drowning Woman,” Hester Stanley At St. Marks.

122

Figure P III: From the nineteenth-century children’s periodical Chatterbox (1884–99).

131

Figure 9.1:

134

1719 Frontispiece of Robinson Crusoe.

Figure P IV: From the nineteenth-century children’s periodical Chatterbox (1884–99).

195

Figure 14.1: This portrait was included in the Agassiz Association column in many issues of St. Nicholas and as the frontispiece of the Handbook of the Agassiz Association.

214

Figure 15.1: “They Discussed and Experimented”: frontispiece, Mark Twain’s “A Dog’s Tale.”

239

Series Editor’s Foreword

Dedicated to furthering original research in children’s literature and culture, the Children’s Literature and Culture series includes monographs on individual authors and illustrators, historical examinations of different periods, literary analyses of genres, and comparative studies on literature and the mass media. The series is international in scope and is intended to encourage innovative research in children’s literature with a focus on interdisciplinary methodology. Children’s literature and culture are understood in the broadest sense of the term children to encompass the period of childhood up through adolescence. Owing to the fact that the notion of childhood has changed so much since the origination of children’s literature, this Routledge series is particularly concerned with transformations in children’s culture and how they have affected the representation and socialization of children. While the emphasis of the series is on children’s literature, all types of studies that deal with children’s radio, film, television, and art are included in an endeavor to grasp the aesthetics and values of children’s culture. Not only have there been momentous changes in children’s culture in the last fifty years, but there have been radical shifts in the scholarship that deals with these changes. In this regard, the goal of the Children’s Literature and Culture series is to enhance research in this field and, at the same time, point to new directions that bring together the best scholarly work throughout the world. Jack Zipes

xv

Introduction Monika Elbert

We pretend to make little men and women out of our children, and we make little dwarfs and hobgoblins out of them. (Julian Hawthorne 1887: 111)

In recent years much critical attention has turned to the study of children’s literature as it reflects social values and also mirrors the culture of adults. Children are no longer seen as passive well-behaved miniature adults (even though nineteenth-century conduct books would make them out to be so), but, endowed with individual wills and minds, as active participants in the political and social arenas. They are vehicles of transmission for moral values and political views, and as such, for good or for ill, they become the promulgators of culture for future generations. In his essay “Literature for Children” (1887), Julian Hawthorne recalls the art of his master storyteller father, who promoted the power of imagination, and inadvertently attacks his own generation of children’s writers (Julian was an unsuccessful writer of both adult and children’s fiction) for the impulse to leave out the imagination (the inventive streak, or the intuitive faculty) from the pages for children. He attacks his own generation’s “fear of fairies”; children’s authors deny the magical realm in their insistence upon verisimilitude and realism. Though Julian becomes a failed writer of children’s stories, he does call for a balance in the ideal and practical approach to the juvenile audience. On a practical level, he calls for the inculcation of values, as he defines the child as transmitter of values: “Let us admit that, things being as they are, it is necessary to develop the practical side of the child’s nature, to ground him in moral principles, and to make him comprehend and fear—nominally, God, but really—society” (p. 110). This didactic and pragmatic approach—to make children good (and fearful!) citizens of a democracy (through cautionary tales) is countered by the idealistic approach: “But why, in addition to doing this, should we strangle the unpractical [sic] side of his nature—the ideal, imaginative, spiritual side—the side which alone can

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determine his value or worthlessness in eternity?” (p. 110). The question Julian Hawthorne poses here reflects a higher realm of aspiration for America’s children, as it relates to spirituality and to the “eternal.” Less secular, more mystical, his plea also demands a recognition of the need for the practical, as he still insists upon the ideal: “Whether this boy’s worldly destination be to clean a stable or to represent his country at a foreign court, he will do his work all the better, instead of worse, for having been allowed expansion on the ideal plane” (p. 111). Putting aside the gender imbalance of this prescript, one wonders about the fate of the boy cleaning a stable—who has been allowed the expansion of his imagination, but only to do a stable boy’s job. This is not simply the quandary of the late nineteenth century, but of the earlier nineteenth-century educators, such as Bronson Alcott, who, endowed with Romantic or Transcendentalist ideas, entertained the possibility that the imagination was the highest faculty of children (and adults). If there is a democracy of the mind and a citizenship of geniuses, as Emerson would have it when he discussed genius as not privileged but “the sound estate of every man” in “The American Scholar” (1837) how does one exercise its power, especially in a society that preaches ambition, competition, inequality, and exclusion? How do the musings of the mediocre facilitate a better life style, if capitalist success is measured in terms of wealth and station? Julian Hawthorne’s didactic aims for children—to create good moral citizens (by instilling fear) and to allow them free rein of the imagination—are not necessarily compatible and require a certain kind of instruction book! How do we turn children into free citizens, who will follow adult orders, and, at the same time, be allowed to entertain new possibilities for the future and to exercise their will? Indeed, Julian’s father, the more illustrious Hawthorne, writes in his “The Paradise of Children,” a rewrite of the Pandora myth in his A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1850), about two orphan children: the boy, Epimetheus, plays it safe, and the girl, Pandora, is feisty, creative, and resists authority. She does remark sadly about Epimetheus, “What a dull boy he is! . . . I do wish he had a little more enterprise” (p. 85, emphasis mine). The chapters in this book examine the contradictions involved in the creation of enterprising children—in the perceptions of children as active or passive, as representatives of a new order or as receptacles of the transmitted values of their parents. The chapters also take into consideration the various ways in which the adults imprint their values upon the children—how the writers of children’s literature participate in the propaganda of good citizenship, often translated into a status quo that is stifling but safe. A status quo that ultimately upholds a pragmatic world view and denies the soaring of the imagination, at least for some of its small citizens.1 The question, then, is whether the business of telling children’s stories becomes an adult enterprise, or whether children are enterprising enough to resist the indoctrination of the children’s publishing enterprise and to decipher covert subversive messages encoded in the texts by the children’s authors. And

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to use Julian Hawthorne’s words, do we make freaks of our children by making them conform, or do they become monsters (dwarves and hobgoblins) by our giving them permission to be utopian and to dream in a society that demands conformity? And, if fantasies or dreams are encouraged, are they solipsistic —do children grow up unaware of others’ plights if they are not shown the practical or less pleasant side of life? Is it possible to tell the truth, or do we seek to shelter children from the realities of life? How far do adults go in promulgating lies, or, in exaggerating possibilities for the future? As Jack Zipes (1981) has contended, “Literature for children is script coded by adults for the information and internalization of children which must meet the approbation of adults” (p. 19). How does one incite children into action, and how are children’s writers complicit in keeping children passive? What is the adult agenda, and how do children resist that agenda or adhere to the old protocol? As Zipes also notes, the frame or context of the children’s text works on a contradictory level: it “curtails the view of the young reader” but “sometimes even seeks to contain the mind with contents that dare children to go beyond the borders” (p. 19)— the gaps between the borders are potentially liberating for children (p. 31). How are the children’s writers subversive in defining codes of success, and how can children fully participate in social change? Some of the children’s authors examined in this collection will appear to maintain the status quo more than others, or they briefly entertain the possibility of a different more utopian lifestyle, if only to return to the status quo at the end of the narrative. Others offer an idealized world view, but they often lapse into a realistic script when they encounter the serious obstacles in life (often associated with economics). A brief overview of recently published books shows the growing fascination with the tensions and contradictions involved in our conception of children as passive spectators or as active players on the broad canvas of history. My vision accords with that of Caroline Levander and Carol Singley (2003), in their edited collection The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader: “literary representations of children and childhood are not isolated aesthetic artifacts but cultural productions that in turn affect the social climates around them” (p. 6). However, that volume has a broad focus (two centuries of children’s literature), whereas this collection keeps its focus on nineteenth-century American children’s literature and education. In Dependent States: The Child’s Part in NineteenthCentury American Culture, Karen Sánchez-Eppler (2005) discusses children as both “objects” and “forces of socialization” (p. xv), as she observes the underlying tension between “depicting childhood as a rhetoric for the articulation of social norms, and recognizing children as particular persons affected and often betrayed by those very norms” (p. xxiii). Using middle-class agendas for children espoused by writers of adult and juvenile fiction, Sánchez-Eppler reveals how children become vehicles of national reform, even if their agendas are limited and circumscribed by their parents’/teachers’ attitudes toward class and race and by national imperialist politics. Sánchez-Eppler has a tendency to use adult writers to portray images of children in adult literature: for example, she focuses

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on Hawthorne’s concept of the child, in Pearl/The Scarlet Letter, without taking into account his children’s stories; surprisingly, extended discussions of juvenile writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Jacob Abbott and Horatio Alger are missing. Or she looks at images of children in popular culture, as in photos of dead children (or memento mori). By contrast, the chapters forming Enterprising Youth seek to understand the world (and indoctrination) of children through a careful examination of writing specifically addressed to children (for the most part)—and intended for children. Other studies of children’s literature and culture testify to the power and liberating effect writing for the children’s market had on sentimental women writers. Deborah De Rosa (2003), for example, points to the example of “domestic abolitionism” for women that granted them a voice “when cultural imperatives demanded their silence.” De Rosa’s study shows the positive effects of sentimental/domestic abolitionists who wrote for children’s journals: “although these domestic abolitionists appear to limit themselves to eliciting tears of sympathy from their readers, they also subtly, but subversively, critique slavery’s destruction of the black child’s innocence and the family unit, especially the mother–child bond” (p. 10). Their writing “encouraged children to effect change through activities ranging from liberal, public activism to familial and/or private reflection” (p. 11). According to De Rosa, “revisionist histories” of the mother–historian/storyteller figure, “employ everything from sentimental rhetoric to an increasingly radical, legalistic, and quasi-seditious rhetoric” (p. 81). Though her focus on woman’s empowerment is interesting and valid (as children and women were seen as similarly passive and helpless), the works in this collection, though they do not discount the power of sentimentality, focus more on children (rather than women) as offering the possibilities of change for the community at large, or show the limitations of sentimental narratives. Thus, such writers as Sedgwick, Spofford, Stoddard, Alcott, and Phelps are treated in this volume as being more acerbic or cynical in their use of sentiment. Writing about the power of sentiment in children’s fiction, Bonnie James Shaker (2003) shows, in Coloring Locals: Racial Formations in Kate Chopin’s Youth Companion Stories, the liberating posture of Kate Chopin as a woman writer, but also reveals her conservative attitudes, in her stories for the bestselling juvenile periodical, Youth’s Companion, where she upholds traditional family values and the status quo by “whitewashing” Creole and Cajun protagonists. In an almost contradictory fashion, Chopin tries to elevate the status of the Creole or Cajun woman by denying her race, by investing her with middleclass respectability: “Her fiction’s agenda to color local Creoles and Cajuns white and the necessity of that agenda to occasionally deploy orthodox representations of femininity in its service speaks to the importance of her Youth’s Companion stories and their role in facilitating our understanding of the body of her work” (p. 27). Focusing on the image of the “idealized child” of juvenile fiction, Shaker shows that women were still stuck in a type of sentimental time warp: “Though reproductivity may not have been the late nineteenth-century woman’s destiny

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… the inescapable love of children was” (p. 59). Chopin’s Youth’s Companion stories “draw upon romanticized discourses of childhood in order to further sentimentalize woman’s maternal ‘instincts’ and thereby reify motherhood” (p. 59). Chopin subscribes to this maternal discourse, and so her feminism is “moderated by her classist, regionalist, and racial interests” (p. 59). I would also add that the middle-class discourse of maternal love was skewed in its sense of charity’s recipients. As the reformer Bradford Peirce announced to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1857, the purpose of saving a “fallen woman” was to make sure she would become an ideal mother, for the benefit of the entire community: “because the children of the virtuous must breathe the atmosphere exhaled by the vicious” (quoted in Vallone 1995: 136). Other recent cultural historians and literary critics of children’s literature focus on the political dimension of children’s lives, especially in moments of crisis. For example, James Marten and Alice Fahs make compelling cases for the proactive child during the Civil War. Using primary sources, social historian James Marten looks at the experiences of hardship and suffering for the children who lived through the Civil War. In her chapter, “A Boys’ and Girls’ War,” Alice Fahs (2001) analyzes the “adventurous war literature” for children, focusing on such images as the courageous Drummer Boy, who appeared in songs and stories alike. In 1863 John Townsend Trowbridge published The Drummer Boy, which started a series of patriotic adventure/wartime stories for boys by such famous boys’ book authors as Oliver Optic and Horatio Alger. And in parallel texts for girls, such as Alcott’s “Nelly’s Hospital,” girls are taught to do what they know best, to nurture and heal. As Fahs (2001) points out, “the war … was portrayed and perceived as part of a new adventurous individualism, with war itself a splendid adventure facilitated by the embryonic national state” (p. 286). Though Fahs is not as explicit as I am, her conclusion accords with the theme of this volume that much of the children’s literature catered to the white middle-class taste and ideals of individualism. If there is recourse to activism, the children become activists to promote their own sense of adventure or well-being. This is not to downplay the positive effect of political engagement, but the stories do not dwell upon the plight of the black slave child, and behind the action, one perceives the white middle-class agenda again. In her analysis of the Oliver Optic series in “Remembering the Civil War in Children’s Literature of the 1880s and 1890s,” Fahs (2004) shows quite clearly the hypocrisy and historical amnesia of the middle-class reading public. Although “Children’s literature is often dismissed as a mere ‘step-child’ of more important adult literature” (p. 91), according to Fahs, the effects of such writing on children are pernicious. The post-Civil War stories for Northern boys (Oliver Optic) or for Southern boys (Thomas Nelson Page) do not concern themselves with the plight of African Americans during Reconstruction; instead, their “visions of reconciliation” were “united by an underlying consensus that the war had been—and should remain in memory—a white, masculinist experience in American life” (p. 91). Janet Gray, author of Race and Time: American Women’s

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Poetics from Antislavery to Racial Modernity (2004), and contributor to this volume, is certainly justified in discussing the discourse of exclusion in children’s literature. She analyzes the theory of class stratification in Mary Mapes Dodge’s prospectus for the journal St Nicholas: Dodge “implies that the classic productive values of the work ethic need to be supplemented by gentrified consumption values if the middle class is to advance” (p. 212). As many of the chapters in Enterprising Youth show, there are different agendas for the different classes portrayed in children’s periodicals—and a type of Darwinian survival of the fittest that is espoused. The socialization process often involves middle-class biases and agendas for self-betterment—there needs to be a system of “haves” and “have-nots.” This collection of works looks at the agenda behind the shaping of nineteenth-century American children’s perceptions and world views and behind the transmission of civic duties and social values to children by adults. The “model” children of the nineteenth century, the entitled children adored and praised in the juvenile fiction, create a marginalization (based primarily on class and race, and on capitalist notions of success) that replicates the world view of their middle-class parents. However, the inculcation of values is not without resistance: writers of children’s fiction and nonfiction find much to attack about the mainstream culture or middle-class mores they are ostensibly upholding in their work, but their subversive message can be read between the lines. The plot and subplots, and the child protagonist’s actions, depict a clash of cultures, between middle-class and working-class families, between boys’ and girls’ social practices, between nationalistic pride and a dangerous xenophobia, and between adult and children’s notions of the imagination. Most often, the attack is on economic and capitalistic practices that continue to keep large sectors of the population oppressed and that tend to limit the child’s imagination and to dash his hopes for the future. The children’s writers do not necessarily find a solution, but they expose the problem, and by working with (or “playing” with, from the child’s perspective) the differences in adult/juvenile modes of perception and the tensions created by ethics and economics, they destabilize the system and blur the boundaries between gender expectations, class differences, and nationalism and internationalism. The chapters in this book examine the contradictions involved—in the perceptions of children as active or passive, as representatives of a new order or as receptacles of the transmitted values of their parents. This collection of literary and historical criticism of nineteenth-century American children’s literature draws upon recent assessments of canon formations, gender studies, cultural studies, and psychological paradigms of the child’s mind to show how concepts of public/ private, male/female, and national/foreign are collapsed and thus to reveal a picture of American childhood and life that is expansive and constrictive at the same time. In the book’s first thematic cluster, “Civic Duties and Moral Pitfalls,” four chapters address the question of civic responsibility in children’s literature. This

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part, focusing on children’s popular journals, revolves around the idea of citizenship, ethics, and methods of inclusion and exclusion. In Chapter 1, Lorinda B. Cohoon shows how Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Catharine Maria Sedgwick use the domestic sphere to consider citizenship and national identity while Monika Elbert’s examination of Alcott’s fiction and essays in Chapter 2 brings into question the nature of middle-class responsibility toward the underclass. In Chapter 3, Janet Gray collaborates with her recent graduate students on a study of the founding of St. Nicholas: Scribner’s Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls in 1873 to show the contradictory treatment of class and gender by that publication. Roxanne Harde’s Chapter 4 discusses the controversial orphanage system as seen through the lens of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s fiction. In the second thematic cluster, “Politicizing Children: ‘Normalization’ and the Place of the Marginalized Child,” the four chapters explore children’s agency with regard to race and class as national issues. In Chapter 5, Martha Sledge argues that The Anti-Slavery Alphabet invites the abolitionist–student into the world of literacy while excluding the slave. In Chapter 6, Jeannette Barnes Lessels and Eric Sterling focus on the last three volumes of Abbott’s five-volume book series (1859–60) to discuss racism toward African Americans in the North in the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter 7 by Lesley Ginsberg examines Harriet Beecher Stowe’s troublesome writings for children in the context of her views toward race, especially in the aftermath of the Civil War. Chapter 8 by Rita Bode discusses the rampant xenophobia of the times in Spofford’s “Hester Stanley” stories and shows how Spofford collapses distinctions between “civilized” and “heathen.” Part III, “Sentimental and Realistic Constructs of Childhood,” addresses the “othering” and “normalizing” of children. In Chapter 9, Shawn Thomson, for example, shows how the Robinson Crusoe import could help the enterprising young boy negotiate between the domestic and marketplace worlds: as a family book, it was often a treasured possession that endorsed Christian piety and industry, and as a masculinist adventure, it served as fertile ground for exciting arenas of competition and offered tests of physical and mental prowess. In Chapter 10, Maria Holmgren Troy examines how Elizabeth Stoddard challenges the prevailing religious discourse and the ethics of sentimentalism to question ideals of domesticity and true womanhood. Chapter 11 by Melanie Dawson shows the common denominator between white and American Indian memoirwriters at the turn of the twentieth century in terms of a sentimental backward glance toward childhood. Chapter 12 by Anne Lundin situates Kate Douglas Wiggin’s fiction within Transcendentalism and Romantic pedagogy to show the author’s sense of idealized/idealistic childhood. In the wide panorama of children’s literature, similarities can be seen in the authors’ inclinations to use sentimentality to subvert conventional views of behavior and realism to expose problem areas that need rectification. Both the sentimental and realistic portrayals of children’s life in nineteenth-century American literature may have a transformative effect, as they can lead to a utopian vision for the future, either

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through an optimistic affirmation of human goodness and morality or a scathing indictment of crooked politics and economics. Part IV of the book, “Education and Shifting Paradigms of the Child’s Mind,” focuses on prevalent models of pedagogy and psychology and the liberating effects or conservative influences upon the child’s mind in relation to contemporary scientific and educational findings. In Chapter 13, Eric S. Hintz investigates children’s biographies of inventors to show a privileging of the inventor’s good morals over the scientific or technological achievement. In Chapter 14, J.D. Stahl discusses the contrast in ideologies between industrial capitalism and the focus on ecology promulgated in the St. Nicholas magazine. Chapter 15 by Joan Menefee continues the discussion of the relationship between the child and the natural world by investigating the “recapitulationist” paradigm of nineteenth-century child psychology and children’s relationship to animals. In a fitting concluding chapter, Holly Blackford proposes a Realist model of childhood through a consideration of Twain’s and Henry James’s representations of children’s perceptions, as she looks forward to a Modernist paradigm of childhood. In Gala Days (1863), Gail Hamilton, who wrote for the nineteenth-century American adult and children’s market, describes the constraints placed upon children and the inadequacies of parents as she debunks the idea that childhood is idyllic. She proclaims, perhaps tongue in cheek, “I think childhood is the most undesirable portion of human life, and I am thankful to be well out of it” (p. 412). She bemoans the plight of the child, who at an early age is forced to follow his parents’ will and submit to a preordained education: “There is not a child in the land that can call his soul, or his body, or his jacket his own. A little soft lump of clay he comes into the world, and is moulded [sic] into a vessel of honor or dishonor long before he can put in a word about the matter” (p. 412). The nineteenth-century children’s authors examined in this volume are aware of a child’s impressionable nature and attempt to preserve the child’s voice, or at least have the child rediscover this lost voice. In doing this, the authors uncover a myriad of voices, some more hushed than others, as they attempt to bring dignity and balm to the child’s wounded soul and body, though the final image may prove unsettling. Notes 1

This had been a debate waged by nineteenth-century American children’s writers. Jacob Abbott, for example, felt that rational thinking should be promoted, but that the hearts of his readers should also be touched so that children would make moral decisions. Later, William Taylor Adams, writing under the pseudonym “Oliver Optic,” felt that juvenile writers had to spice up their stories to make them more attractive to children: he embedded lessons about civic duties in his tales of adventure.

Part I Civic Duties and Moral Pitfalls

Figure P I: From the nineteenth-century children’s periodical Chatterbox (1884–99). Reproduced from Carol Belanger Grafton Children: A Pictorial Archive from Nineteenth-Century Sources (NY: Dover, 1978).

Chapter One “A Just, A Useful Part”: Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Contributions to The Juvenile Miscellany and The Youth’s Companion Lorinda B. Cohoon

During the 1830s and 1840s, Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Catharine Maria Sedgwick made contributions to Lydia Maria Child’s The Juvenile Miscellany and Nathaniel Parker Willis’ The Youth’s Companion. 1 In poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that they produced for children, Sigourney and Sedgwick depicted women commenting on childhood citizenship and intervening in the educations of boys and sometimes girls. Both writers drew on the domestic sphere to meditate on public issues that connect to citizenship and national identity. Sedgwick’s work for adult readers has been especially celebrated as part of the effort to recover women’s writing, and her explorations of women’s participation in and resistance to the violent treatment of Native Americans have been discussed in revised literary histories and feminist scholarship.2 Both Sigourney and Sedgwick have made significant contributions to children’s periodicals, and this chapter uses the feminist scholarship on Sigourney and Sedgwick to ask questions about representations of women in their children’s literature. This chapter also explores women writers’ use of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) might term the “nomad space” of children’s periodicals, a space which combines the qualities of smooth nomad space and striated sedentary space. Deleuze and Guattari explain about the nomad space: even though the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or customary routes, it does not fulfill the function of the sedentary road, which is to parcel out

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a closed space to people, assigning each person a share and regulating the communication between shares. The nomadic trajectory does the opposite: it distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating. (emphasis original, p. 380)3 Because the dominant culture has deemed children’s periodicals as safe, regulated, “respectable” spaces for women to write, women writers are able to comment on cultural problems directly and indirectly, and without extensive editorial censorship. In this way, Sigourney and Sedgwick’s contributions use both the striated and regulated spaces of the periodical and also the smooth, indefinite qualities of the form to agitate for change. In “1440: The Smooth and the Striated,” Deleuze and Guattari explain that there is always a mixture of the smooth and the striated: No sooner do we note a simple opposition between the two kinds of space than we must indicate a much more complex difference by virtue of which the successive terms of the oppositions fail to coincide entirely. And no sooner have we done that than we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space. (1987: 474) Children’s periodicals and women’s writers’ contributions to them thus become complex mixtures of well-organized striations that characterize sedentary space and the open smoothness that marks the nomad space. The children’s periodicals of the early national period served as a regular outlet for Sigourney and Sedgwick’s writing, providing them with a means of exploring their own positions on women’s roles in the relatively new nation. While women could supplement their income through writing, in many cases, the content of the pieces was frequently controlled by men who owned the publishing houses that produced the magazines or by editors. For example, Nathaniel Parker Willis held religious views that made some texts with religious content more likely to be published. At other times, the political interests of editors such as Lydia Maria Child allowed the contributors to make links between the didactic and sentimental material deemed culturally acceptable for children and political issues related to women’s citizenship, race, and the treatment of Native Americans.4 In addition to editing the Juvenile Miscellany, Lydia Maria Child also made contributions to it that highlight her awareness of the complexity of American women’s positions in a society that made claims of equality for all while denying equality and access to education and citizenship privileges to women, children, and people of color. In “Lydia Maria Child and the Juvenile Miscellany,” Carolyn Karcher notes that Child “made children’s literature a vehicle for inculcating the principles she held most vital to a democratic republic (as opposed to a monarchy)—principles that included

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a commitment to equal rights for all and the courage to stand by one’s inner convictions, as well as the internalization of the middle-class work ethic” (1995: 92).5 Some of Child’s stories, such as “Jumbo and Zairee,” published in 1831, were explicitly anti-slavery stories and called on the readers who were mothers and children to take an anti-slavery stance, or to participate in what Deborah De Rosa terms “domestic abolitionism.”6 The explicitness of Child’s anti-slavery stance shortened the run of the Miscellany (it ran for eight years) and Karcher notes that Willis did not publish Child’s anti-slavery stories or her stories about Native Americans (1994: 68).7 While Child’s explicitly political stories about slavery establish what Karcher describes as “the limits of the influence Child exerted on the development of the fledgling genre” of children’s literature, they also indicate that this form was to become important in shaping children’s attitudes as well as their reading tastes (p. 68). Although the texts that Sigourney and Sedgwick published in The Youth’s Companion and the Juvenile Miscellany are not as explicitly abolitionist as Child’s texts, they are politically charged and Child, Sigourney, and Sedgwick all recognize the significant role that women, and specifically mothers, have to play in influencing children’s reading habits. In Managing Literacy, Mothering America, Sarah Robbins discusses how many “literacy narratives” by women writers “affirmed a view of literacy as ideologically charged yet still allowing for individual agency—by both writers and readers” (2004: 17). The contributions that Sigourney and Sedgwick make to children’s periodicals encourage such agency-imbued literacies and also position readers to make active responses to the content they encounter. An area of concern for Sigourney and Sedgwick, one evident in the articles, stories, and poems they published, is the ability of women to intervene in the moral and civic education of children. As Linda Kerber (1986) notes in her work on Republican motherhood, mothers in America were given the task of educating their sons and daughters so that they could become patriotic, productive contributors to the nation, and children’s periodicals became one place where women wrote about mother’s roles in shaping their children’s attitudes toward the nation. Many of the periodical pieces construct and critique the citizenships, whether full, partial, or nonexistent, that are available to women and children in the United States and ask child readers to think through the contradictions inherent in the rights that are offered to some and denied to others. Child readers are then invited to learn from examples in the texts to act to effect change. Although these pieces focus on the lives of mothers and children, they also reference national policies on slavery, the Indian Removal Acts, and imperial expansion, and show their close connection to domestic and the filial spheres. Both writers’ periodical contributions then provide insights into how the emerging form of the children’s periodical provided women writers with opportunities to intervene in constructions of national identity and childhood citizenship.8 Both writers draw from topics that focus on children at home, at school, and at play. Sigourney’s poetry frequently examines mother–child relationships, with

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poems that make wishes for sons and daughters growing up in the new nation and poems that explore childhood sickness and infant death. Janet Gray writes in Race and Time: American Women’s Poetics from Antislavery to Racial Modernity (2004) that “poetry and childhood were entwined throughout the nineteenth century” and that women used childhood to play with ideas about progress and political change and also to avoid exploring these issues: [w]riting for children called for simplified diction, formal concentration, the masking of adult (historical and political) concerns, and the encapsulation of abstract ideas in vivid images. Women took the lead in writing children’s verse early in the century, making children’s poetry part of the project of women’s print culture. (p. 187) Certainly, Sigourney’s poems connect women’s experiences to children’s poetry, and they do make use of simple diction and masking techniques that Gray describes. At first glance, many of the poems read as simple sentimental and didactic pieces; there are poems that make wishes for sons and daughters growing up in the new nation, poems that mourn infant deaths, and poems that offer advice about how to respond to domestic chores and responsibilities. Writing about the uses of sentiment in “The Female Woman,” Lauren Berlant argues that “sentimental ideology served as a structure of consent” in which women experienced a “counterpublic sphere” (1992: 270). Sigourney’s and Sedgwick’s sentimental pieces do seem to participate in a structure of consent— this, after all, is part of why Willis published them—but, they also convey a politics that mines the smooth space of the private for argument strategies.9 Their poetry includes descriptions of how familial relationships might shape the public politics of their sons while constructing girls and women as partners and allies who can identify with the private examples used to critique the patriarchal culture. When their texts have been considered as part of American literature, critics have noted the complexity of Sigourney and Sedgwick’s uses of both the domestic and the public spheres as sources for topics for publication. In “Sympathy as Strategy in Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie,” Dana Nelson asks about Sedgwick’s use of sentiment as a strategy to move male readers to action: “[d]oes she simply utilize [sentiment] as an effective strategy to gain authorial advantage, or does she also employ it to proffer an alternative social vision?” (1992: 192). In her children’s pieces, Sedgwick does both, and Sigourney’s sentimental poetry uses similar strategies. In “An Infant’s Spirit,” for example, Sigourney examines the unrealized citizenship of weak or sickly children, while in “The Divided Burden,” both of which will be discussed in more detail, boys are admonished to be “open to the ills/ Of foreigner, and stranger, of the race/ whom Afric’s sun hath darken’d” (p. 93).10 While this poem asks for sympathy for racial Others, further examination will show that it also reinforces the centrality of white patriarchal power. Scholars have struggled to come to terms with the racism

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and ethnocentrism present in Sigourney’s and Sedgwick’s writings; Judith Fetterley (1998) describes the need for a way of reading texts by nineteenth-century American women that balances the polarity between the hagiography characteristic of the first phase of recovery, a hagiography directly proportional to the misogyny informing previous treatment of these writers and texts, and the critique associated with the second phase, a critique that implicates these writers and their texts in a variety of nineteenth-century racist, classist, and imperialist projects. (p. 492) Striving for such a critical balance in an examination of Sigourney’s poems involves acknowledging the racism, classism, and imperialism that permeates significant critiques of citizenships available to women and children in the United States. One of the private topics on which Sigourney’s contributions to the Companion focuses is death. Specifically, many poems contemplate deaths of mothers and children. This is not particularly unusual—because of higher infant and child mortality rates. Adult writers for children seem to assume that children have some familiarity with death. Working from within protestant religious frameworks, publishers of these magazines saw that awareness of death could be used persuasively when discussing the potential of damnation, and poetry and prose pieces about the deaths of children appear regularly. While Sigourney chooses this common topic, instead of drawing attention to the need for salvation, she uses her poems about death to comment on earthly citizenships. In poems published in the Youth’s Companion, Sigourney draws on the commonality of death to discuss problems associated with citizenship. In “An Infant’s Spirit,” Sigourney asks questions about the citizenships of children who have died: An infant’s soul—the sweetest thing of earth, To which endowments beautiful are given, As might befit a more than mortal birth— What shall it be, when ‘midst its winning mirth, And love, and trustfulness, ‘tis borne to heaven? Will it grow into might above the skies?— A spirit of high wisdom, glory, power— A cherub guard of the Eternal Tower, With knowledge filled of its vast mysteries? Or will perpetual childhood be its dower?— To sport forever, a bright, joyous thing, Amid the wonders of the shining thrones, Yielding its praise in glad, but feeble tones. A tender dove beneath the Almighty’s wing? (1840: 60)

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With its five questions and its emphasis on “endowments,” “might,” “power,” and “knowledge,” this poem expresses a yearning for “bright” and “joyous” citizenships that are not available to “mortals.” At the same time, it images such citizenships as available only when experienced through death, with protection provided by the “Almighty’s wing.” Thus, although the citizenship is “joyous,” it is a “feeble” citizenship, contained and weak, with the child unable to expand or use power, because the early death prohibits the experience of growth to adult citizenship on earth. At the same time that it is depicted as feeble, childhood citizenship is also constructed as full of possibility, but the possibilities are presented in the form of questions, and the questions suggest an uncertainty that such “perpetual” power and freedom could exist in death. Why use the topic of death to examine issues of public and private citizenship? Partly, the power of sentiment associated with death provides a means of broaching questions of power. Writing about death and responding to other areas of life that are associated with pain and sorrow through art become strategies for gaining or understanding power. “Vocal Music” (1840) provides an example of a poem that explores power. It appears in the same issue as Sigourney’s “An Infant’s Spirit.” This poem offers insight into early nineteenthcentury attitudes about artistic responses to everyday difficulties: Sing at your work—’twill lighten The labors of the day— Sing at your work –’twill brighten The darkness of the way;— Sing at your work—though sorrow Its lengthen’d shade may cast, Joy cometh on the morrow— A sunbeam cheers the blast, To pain a brief dominion Is o’er the spirit given— but music nerves the pinion That bears it up to heaven.” (p. 60) Although this poem focuses on using song to lighten the “labors”—presumably domestic labors—it also mentions using music to dispel sorrow. The pain caused by sorrow can be powerful enough to have “dominion,” but music and artistic expression can intervene in its oppressive forces. When Sigourney’s “An Infant’s Spirit” asks questions about the usefulness of a child’s death, and the child’s fleeting, feeble citizenship, she uses poetry to resist the “dominion” of patriarchy’s oppressive, often silencing forces. The complexity of the citizenship potential with which the infant spirit is endowed provides interesting material for consideration of twenty-first-century constructions of citizenships. In The Queen of New York Goes to Washington City, Lauren Berlant writes of the prevalence of “infantile citizenships,” in which

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citizens are constructed as infantile, naive, and dependent on incomprehensible and corrupt governments: “the infantile citizen has a memory of the nation and a tactical relation to its operation. But no vision of sustained individual or collective criticism and agency accompanies the national system here” (1997: 51). The infantile citizen is constructed as unable to make decisions about intimate issues, and the power of this construction currently influences policy moves to protect “fetal” citizens at the expense of adult citizens’ choices. Sigourney’s poem about the infant spirit highlights tensions between the playfulness, and lack of responsibilities commonly associated with childhood and desires to control or protect that playfulness through the interventions of the “Almighty” government. Through reflections on death, then, Sigourney’s poems contemplate a variety of citizenship privileges and show, using private scenes of grief, how these privileges are available to only a few. Rather than showcasing death as entirely inevitable, and as a sign of a lack of usefulness, poems by Sigourney hint that the cultural interest in death and the “sentimental” power of mourning might be used to effect changes in citizenship circumstances. Sigourney’s poems use sorrow to convey both private and public sentiments about men’s participation in oppressive, freedom-limiting institutions, including slavery and the subjugation of women, and the “grief laden” tone is also present in some poems about live children. Sigourney’s poem titled “The Little Hand” examines how national and international experiences of war, cruelty, and oppression will be part of the adulthoods that follow childhood, especially for boys. As a prayer for an infant boy, the narrative voice asks the Almighty to keep the little hand from the evils of citizenship: From cruel war’s discolored blade, From withering penury’s pain; From dark oppression’s direful trade, And from the miser’s gain. (1839: 84) The “direful trade” that the poem asks for the son to be prevented from participating in can be understood to be the “oppression” of slavery. The mother asks instead that a different citizenship be granted: “Discharge a just, a useful part,/Through life’s uncertain maze” (p. 84). The “just”, “useful” part that the mother imagines for her son is the kind of citizenship that the mother (and the daughter) of this time could not have. Even as the poem yearns for a useful citizenship for the son, it expresses sorrow that such citizenship is unavailable to others, and mourns the inevitability that the son will be involved in cruel and direful acts as a part of growth into citizenship. Certainly, images of children and childhood in nineteenth-century prose and poetry are part of the larger rhetorical scene of nation building. In “‘Let Her White Progeny Offset Her Dark One’: The Child and the Racial Politics of

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Nation Making,” Caroline Levander argues that theories of childhood and national identity have tended to overlook how the racial meanings historically inhering in the child . . . may help, in fact, to shape the numerous political cultures to which they show the child richly contributes. However, charting the crucial role the child historically played in transforming nonwhites into racial others from the early national period through the nineteenth century creates an important cultural context for understanding the child’s ongoing significance to these wide-ranging U.S. social formations. (2004: 224) Many of the pieces published in the early children’s periodicals do raise questions about the white child’s relationship to the African-American citizen. It is in poems that focus on growth into adulthood that the material for children combines the power of the private and the public to strive to intervene in the present and future citizenships of children or at the very least to critique the established citizenship paths that are laid out for children to follow. Other poems draw on the natural world to discuss adult citizenship rights to own and exchange property. Sigourney’s poem “The Crop of Acorns” (1840) comments on rights and privileges that are won by trickery and deceit. This poem, which like many pieces published in the Juvenile Miscellany and The Youth’s Companion, appeals to adults as well as children, tells of a man who bargained for a piece of land by saying he would keep it only until he had harvested one crop. He plants acorns, which take years to mature: But long before these oaks sublime Aspiring reach’d their forest prime, The cheated landlord mouldering lay/ Forgotten with his kindred clay.” (p. 16) The poem goes on to warn the young against hiring out their souls to vice, but this poem also seems to hint at the unfair “treaties” by which Native Americans were forced to give up access to the land during Andrew Jackson’s Cherokee Removal Acts of the 1830s. Since it focuses on land use, this poem also provides an example of a poem that explores the striated, sedentary space of land regulation within the smooth space of a poem about acorns and oak trees. While poems focus on the natural world and on young children, and other topics which appear to be relatively simple, they also explore the politics involved in personal relationships between mothers and children and the politics of childrearing. Anxiety about sons participating in citizenships that oppress others emerges in many of Sigourney’s poems. In “The Divided Burden,” Sigourney tells the story of two boys sharing a heavy load, and then concludes the poem with words of admonition to boy readers:

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And when thou art a man, my little one Still keep thy spirit open to the ills Of foreigner, and stranger, of the race Whom Afric’s sun hath darken’d, and of those Poor red-browned exiles, from our forest shades, Where they once rul’d supreme. Thus shalt thou shun That selfishness which, wrapped in its own gifts, Forgets alike the Giver—and the grief Of those who mourn. (1840: 93) The poem explicitly calls on boy readers to cultivate a “spirit open to the ills” that have been brought on by white men’s actions. It does so with the troubling assumption that boys with the potential to become fully fledged citizens are white and that “others” are marked by an African sun, and by “exile” from forests that the narrator states the Native Americans once “ruled Supreme.” The poem calls on boys not to indulge in selfishness that will allow them to forget “the grief of those who mourn”—it does not necessarily ask them to work to prevent the grief. Significantly, the conclusion of the poem calls for bearing the burdens of others—an action, rather than merely an affective response, but an action that does not fully take responsibility for a load that has been given to another.11 This poem also asks boys to construct a citizenship that considers their sisters, although the relationship is not depicted as one between equals, but as one in which the powerful comforts the powerless: “If thy young sister weepeth—kiss the tear/From her smooth cheek, and soothe with tender care/ Her swelling breast” (p. 93). Sibling relationships and cousin relationships in Sigourney’s poems and Sedgwick’s essays and fiction offer ways to understand visions of citizenship that differ from the patriarchal forefather and republican mother models that are so prevalent during the 1820s—and have continued to be prevalent since.12 The children they depict rely on each other, on peer interactions and on sibling support to create viable citizenships for themselves and others. Significantly, these relationships are not always those of equals, but both Sigourney and Sedgwick emphasize understanding and empathy as significant tools that can shape the citizenships of boys and girls. While they construct boyhood citizenship as full of possibilities and dangers, Sigourney’s poems show the difficulty of imagining a world where women can gain agency on earth, and Sigourney figures her dead mothers and children as floating, omniscient beings with choices and freedoms that are not available in life. In “The Motherless Infant,” for example, an infant is addressed and encouraged to look up to a tree to understand where his mother has gone: Thy mother is not dead— There is a home above;

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Where her pure spirit fled; God was her changeless trust, And o’er the lifeless dust, Her soul rose free. (1839: 80) Here, the dead mother “flees” the earth to find freedom in a domestic heaven —a “home above” (p. 80). With the word “home” attached to it, heaven is associated with women’s domestic sphere, and the power and strength of woman’s earthly domain is emphasized through this connection. At the same time, the mother’s spirit has “fled” and her soul is “free,” suggesting that the earthly domestic sphere has elements that make it a confining and constraining space. This poem calls on the young to carefully and mindfully shape useful citizenships for themselves on earth in order to prepare for entry into the “home above” (p. 80). Sedgwick’s The Youth’s Companion pieces also center on the intersection between private and public spheres of activity, and the children’s periodical becomes a “nomad” space where topics such as women’s education can be addressed. In “What is Education?” (1840), Sedgwick writes about young women discussing the nature of university educations that are available to men. Sedgwick structures her piece so that it occurs within the closed doors of the classroom, but the piece questions the gendered division of educational opportunities, and in doing so, uses a classroom scene to draw attention to an issue of gender inequality. Sedgwick draws on domestic power relationships to depict the roles mothers play in educating their sons to become just and fair citizens. In an article that compares the material circumstances of girls’ education to that of boys’ education, Sedgwick examines the uses of education and has the young women ask their teacher, who is a man, questions about the nature of the difference. The questions contest explicit injustices in the higher education opportunities available to women. Titled “Learning,” with the subtitle “What is Education? Extracts from ‘Means and Ends, or Self-Training,’” it shares the space of the page with a serialized novel titled Factory Boy, which tells the story of how a factory boy educates himself and distinguishes himself from the other workers. 13 In its place on the front page of an issue with the “instructive” teaser from a longer text, this article points out that common schools in the 1840s are places where girls and the “great mass” of people receive their knowledge, but also that for young boys and men, “education” can mean an entirely different set of learning practices. The article recounts a discussion by a class of girls about the meaning of education. One of the students comments: “Mr. Smith said, at the Lyceum Lecture, that the great mass of the people received their education at the common schools; and the girls have named nearly all that we learn at the common schools [reading, writing, ciphering, grammar].” Another student adds “I often hear people say of a man that he has ‘had an education,’ when they mean merely that he has been through college.” The girls’ comments point to how

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schools democratize some kinds of learning while they also provide educational distinctions that maintain boundaries between those able to claim an “education” and those able only to read and write. In some ways, the questions that the girls ask about education point to their own desires for justice and equity in educational methods and their interest in useful educations. Sedgwick’s nonfiction essays “model” citizenships that carefully consider how closely the domestic and the familial are linked to citizenships in the public sphere. The article advocates “Self-Training” as the method that is democratically available to middle-class boys, all classes of girls, and other classes of boys, the “great mass,” such as those members of the urban working class targeted by another 1840s periodical, Young American’s Magazine of Self-Improvement. “Self-Training” encompasses experimental leisure time education as well as the other goals of self-education, which in this periodical include upward mobility and stability of the Union.14 However, Sedgwick seems aware that the recognition men and boys can achieve for “self-training” is not always available to girls and women who are similarly interested in such opportunities. Her pieces urge education, but also a practical acceptance of class-based place, an issue Sarah Robbins discusses in her work on Sedgwick’s “benevolent literacy narratives”: Benevolent literacy narratives were closely bound up with Jacksonian-era anxiety over the rise of the common man and fears of uneducated immigrants’ potential for disrupting the republic. (White) middle-class women were constructed in these stories as worthy (and even necessary) guardians of the national welfare, ensuring its well-being by extending their domestic pedagogy to otherwise dangerous members of the lower classes. (2004: 10) We see in the children’s magazines how encouragement to be generous is frequently combined with advice about the kinds of charity that are most useful. Middle-class children who find themselves with something extra to give and want to dispense charity are taught to give to the “deserving” poor, and more often, the focus is not on the less-fortunate but on how children can be generous to their neighbors and family members. In pieces that explore neighborly generosity, Sedgwick writes about how public citizenship can provide the citizen-in-training with difficult ethical choices. One narrative titled “The Bantams” (1839), tells the story of a young boy whose family has taught him to be kind to a lonely widow: “Mrs. Bemis was not poor. She had plenty to eat. But Willie’s parents knew that it is a great pleasure to the old and lonely to be remembered by the young and happy.” Willie is encouraged by his mother to “do to others what you would have others do to you,” and he finds this advice easy to follow, until Mrs. Bemis gives him two bantam hens. She instructs him to take them home without looking in the basket and to keep one and give the other to his cousin George. Willie forgets, opens

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the basket, and one of the bantam hens escapes. Willie captures the chicken and carries it in his apron, but in his hurry to arrive home, he falls, killing the bantam. When his mother points out that the bantam is dead, Willie exclaims that the dead one is his cousin’s. His mother then asks him to follow the golden rule: “supposing Mrs. Bemis had given George the chickens to bring home instead of you, and supposing he had run carelessly, as you did, and fallen down, and killed the chicken, what would you think he ought to do?” Willie decides that he should give the live one to his cousin, “‘George shall have the live bantam; but, mother,’ he added sobbing, ‘it is just as you said—it is not always very easy to do as you would be done by.’” This text explores the golden rule, but it also comments on the complexities of giving and taking, especially in its focus on the ease with which boys (and men) rationalize treating themselves with more consideration than they treat others. We see this in the exchange with George and also earlier in this narrative when Willie decides that in order to be kind to the lonely Mrs. Bemis, he will bring her a half eaten “cookey.” He has already eaten the first half, although he was not hungry. In response to his half gift, she gives him the two chickens. This piece draws attention to the frequency with which women are positioned and called upon to be generous or even selfless, the more difficult ends, of this citizenship arrangement. The article also emphasizes that boys must be taught not to seize the best parts of citizenship for themselves without considering the ramifications for others. For Sigourney and Sedgwick, children’s periodicals provide a “smoothstriated nomad space” to explore and negotiate gender differences and inequities in women’s lives. The child audience provides a forum to record—and to consequently begin to change—the citizenship imbalances that they notice in their own. The serious issues that both writers raise shift the children’s magazine from serving purposes of entertainment to challenging child and adult readers to think critically about the citizenships available to girls, boys, and adults. To twenty-first-century readers, both the Juvenile Miscellany and the less politically revolutionary Youth’s Companion do seem didactic and moralizing in their tone and messages, and Sigourney’s and Sedgwick’s pieces tend to follow the instruction-before-delight tone that characterizes much of the children’s literature of the early nineteenth century. David L. Greene, describing Nathaniel Parker Willis’ editorship during the first years of the Companion writes, “there is little of literary value in the early Companion. As much as he may have tried to sugar-coat the message—and he seldom tried at all—Willis’s main purposes were plain: he wanted to edify his young readers, to instill high (if simplistic) moral principles, and to save their souls” (1984: 509).15 Despite their explicit didacticism, the articles and the stories from The Youth’s Companion provide important records of children’s culture and adult attitudes toward children, particularly adult ideas about what boys should know about the rights and privileges afforded them by their parents, their towns, and their local and national governments. Sedgwick’s and Sigourney’s pieces do focus on politics beyond the domestic sphere, although they do so indirectly, and both writers

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adopt a didactic tone. But by choosing topics about which they are passionate, both writers harness the delight associated with acquiring and reading the weekly issue. Publishing both to sustain themselves and to instruct others, they make repeated inquiries into available and potential citizenships. Their poems, stories, and articles begin to interrogate existing citizenships and shape new ones. They foreground flaws in citizenship and offer attention to the possibilities in others to make their discussions ones that challenge the lacks or weaknesses in citizenships. At the same time, because they choose to publish their critiques in relatively mainstream outlets and they frequently conclude their digressions by encouraging their young characters to make the best of what they have, they become complicit in promoting the very cultural norms that their initial critiques seek to highlight and change. By participating in what Richard Brodhead (1993) might term the “scene” of reading, Sigourney and Sedgwick intervene in the construction of an emerging national literature and comment on future citizenships, calling on child readers to confront flaws and make changes. Both Sigourney’s and Sedgwick’s pieces demonstrate a concern and frustration with women’s abilities to participate in larger civic issues. The topics that emphasize motherhood, child-rearing, and education of girls serve as points of departure for explorations of women’s use of power in public spheres. Their contributions suggest that the world of children’s literature and periodicals provided a publishing space for them to regularly consider women’s roles in shaping the citizenships of readers who were boys, girls, women and also men. Sigourney and Sedgwick’s publications for children do to some extent participate in upholding the dominant culture, but they do so while subtly critiquing inequities in citizenship systems. Their articles and poems direct themselves at gaps, spaces the periodicals need to fill, and using these fissures, both writers comment on the justice and usefulness of citizenship systems. Their commentaries offer slightly more just, more useful possibilities as they bring some economic justice to themselves; their contributions serve a useful part by positioning readers to reconsider accepting their citizenships complacently and inviting them to be “open” to changing the citizenship “ills” that they and their children face. Notes 1

Lydia Huntley Sigourney published signed pieces in The Juvenile Miscellany, a magazine edited by Lydia Maria Child, and Child commissioned pieces from Sedgwick, as well as other women writers of the Federalist period, including Hannah Flagg Gould, Eliza Leslie, and Sarah Josepha Hale. For further discussion, see Carolyn Karcher’s The First Woman in the Republic (1994) and Ruth K. MacDonald’s analysis of The Juvenile Miscellany in R. Gordon Kelly’s Children’s Periodicals of the United States (1984: 258–62). Lydia Maria Child edited the Miscellany from 1826–34 and Sarah Josepha Hale edited it from 1834–36. The Youth’s

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Lorinda B. Cohoon Companion ran from 1827–1929, and Nathaniel Willis, a contemporary of Child, edited it from 1827–56. He frequently reprinted the more religious pieces from Child’s magazine in his own. See, for example, Lucinda Damon-Bach and Victoria Clements’ Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003, and Karen L. Kilcup’s Soft Canons: American Writers and Masculine Tradition, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. See also Mary Kelley’s “Legacy Profile: Catharine Maria Sedgwick 1789–1867,” Legacy 6.2 (Fall 1989): 43–50, and Nina Baym’s “Reinventing Lydia Sigourney,” American Literature 62.3 (Sept. 1990): 385–404. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “Nomadology: The War Machine” in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). See Carolyn Karcher’s The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (1994) for a more extended discussion of how Child’s politics shape her editorship of the Juvenile Miscellany. In her biography of Lydia Maria Child, Karcher (1994) explains that Child’s children’s literature often uses mothers in the roles of teachers where British counterparts use fathers and tutors (p. 62). Karcher writes that Child’s texts also do not “mask nor resolve conflicts involving race” instead “the adult representing the ideology of the dominant society and the youth representing the instinctive sympathies of the heart are vying for Child’s allegiance” (p. 63). In Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 1830–1865, Deborah De Rosa writes about domestic abolitionist texts as a hybrid genre that brings together domestic fiction and texts for children to create a form that promotes an activist stance on slavery. Domestic abolitionists “took advantage of the acceptability of domestic fiction, the rising cult of motherhood and childhood, and the increasing market for juvenile literature as a means to create a literary space that would permit them to walk the tightrope between female propriety and political controversy” (2003: 1). See “Lydia Maria Child and the Juvenile Miscellany” for Karcher’s discussion of how patrons withdrew their support after Child’s anti-slavery stories appeared (1995: 108). In my readings of Sigourney and Sedgwick, I use citizenship to refer to roles within the home, community, and nation, and my readings see citizenship as a negotiation between what Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman describe as “ideas of individual entitlement on the one hand and . . . attachment to a particular community on the other” (1994: 352). Children do not have full national citizenship privileges, and because of this, their rights and freedoms are compared to those denied to African Americans and Native Americans and women. See my study of boyhood citizenship in Serialized Citizenships: Periodicals, Books, and American Boys, 1840–1911 (2006) and Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s Dependent States (2005). See also Janet Gray’s

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discussion of the uses of childhood in Race and Time: American Women’s Poetics from Antislavery to Racial Modernity (2004). I read the private sphere as having the smooth qualities of the nomad space because it is regulated by fewer authorities and the topics and ideas it offers seem inconsequential to those interested in gaining power in more striated, public realms. “An Infant’s Spirit” was published in The Youth’s Companion 14.15 (p. 21 Aug. 1840): 60, and “The Divided Burden” was published in The Youth’s Companion 14.24 (p. 23 Oct. 1840): 93. The call for action—for dividing burdens—is interesting in light of contemporary calls for “compassion” for those less fortunate. For an extensive discussion of the passiveness of compassion, see Lauren Berlant’s collection of essays on this topic Compassion (2004). See Linda Kerber’s (1986) work on republican motherhood. This is one of Sedgwick’s book length manuscripts, excerpted in the 1840 The Youth’s Companion 13.35. For more discussion of the narrative strategies in this piece, see Charlene Avallone’s “Catharine Sedgwick and the ‘Art’ of Conversation” in Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives, eds Lucinda L. Damon-Bach and Victoria Clements, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. Self-education was promoted by magazines such as the Young American’s Magazine of Self-Improvement, a magazine circulated among young mechanics working in factories. The opinion that explicitly didactic material is not worthy of study has prevented some scholars from examining the material printed in the early issues of the Companion. Richard Cutt’s (1972) bibliographic study of the Companion begins in the 1870s, in part because of the opinion that earlier issues were too religious and nonliterary to contain anything worthy of further study.

Chapter Two Charitable (Mis)givings and the Aesthetics of Poverty in Louisa May Alcott’s Christmas Stories Monika Elbert

Throughout her life, Louisa May Alcott, child of a dreamy impractical father, the Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, and of a practical breadwinner (and early social worker) mother, Abigail, was haunted by the feeling of impending poverty. In one of her earliest journal entries, as an adolescent at the disastrous Fruitlands utopian experiment, she responds to a story, “The Judicious Father,” read by her tutor Charles Lane. The story, in her words, was about “How a rich girl told a poor girl not to look over the fence at the flowers, and was cross to her because she was unhappy. The father heard her do it, and made the girls change clothes. The poor one was glad to do it, and he told her to keep them. But the rich girl was very sad, for she had to wear the old ones a week, and after that, she was good to shabby girls” (1989: 1 Sept. 1843). The young Louisa, then twelve, expresses the proper moral sentiment, “I liked it very much, and I shall be kind to poor people.” The lessons that the idealist father would impress upon her and those that her practical mother would teach her can be summarized in her declaration, “I shall be kind to poor people.” The didactic story is telling, in its moral implications: if one is not nice to the “shabby” poor, something will be taken away, and, even worse, one might suffer the fate of the poor girl, if one is so cruel to her. The lesson is enough to scare the young Louisa into wanting to be good and charitable. By extension, and as evidenced in Alcott’s juvenile fiction, if a child helps other people, she will be rewarded amply for her efforts. Implicit in the story’s moral is that a child might not be necessarily good—and so must work at being kind and charitable: as many of Alcott’s early notebook entries reveal, she tried very hard to become a better, less moody and more giving, person. The ideals of duty and renunciation were impressed upon her

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by her father, and the need to work actively toward a humanitarian goal was taught her by her mother. Louisa May Alcott, living with her family in genteel poverty, was in the awkward and contradictory position of feeling entitled but living a less than privileged life. She was obsessed with the lack of money from an early age and lamented (in diaries and letters) having to be seamstress, companion, governess, teacher, and domestic. In 1852, her mother, as a social worker, opened an “intelligence office” (or employment office) for wayward girls seeking domestic employment in Boston: the idea “grew out of her city missionary work and a desire to find places for good girls. It was not fit work for her, but it paid, and she always did what came to her in the way of duty or charity, and let pride, taste, and comfort suffer for love’s sake” (Journals 1852).1 Alcott was aware of the dire financial straits in which her family lived and appreciated her father’s meager attempts at moneymaking (“father wrote and talked when he could get classes or conversations”) and her mother’s steadfastness in keeping the family together. During their Boston residence in the early 1850s, Louisa May was also acutely aware of her sisters’ part in staving off pauperism. Nonetheless, Alcott perceives the family as happy, even with, or perhaps because of the frequent visits from the impoverished and desperate: “Our poor little home had much love and happiness in it, and was a shelter for lost girls, abused wives, friendless children, and weak or wicked men” (1852). The family is deemed respectable because it is following its Christian path of helping others, even though they themselves have nothing, “Father and Mother had no money to give, but gave them sympathy, help, and if blessings would make them rich, they would be millionaires. This is practical Christianity” (1853). She was tormented by the lowly positions, as housekeeper or seamstress, she had to accept, and was keenly aware of her father’s failure as breadwinner: “Father idle, mother at work in the office. Nan and I governessing. Lizzie in the kitchen” (1852). In taking stock (in meticulous end-of-the-year accounts in her journals) of her financial successes from writing, Alcott never seems to relinquish her earlier mindset of poverty. Her stories for children reflect this early fear that poverty could never be eradicated, even in her adult life. Alcott is ambivalent in her treatment of the poor in her private writings and in her fiction, and these attitudes toward charity reflect the conventional (and contradictory) postbellum views toward the poor. After making a “friendly visit” to the orphanage and asylum on Randall’s Island on Christmas day, 1875, a practice common to well-meaning citizens during the holidays,2 Alcott writes a letter to her family in Concord and with great aplomb, declares, “I’ve had a good variety of Christmases in my day, but never one like this before” (Selected Letters: entry for 25 Dec. 1875). The spectator sport of observing those beneath one is all too apparent in her observations, and one can apply Foucault’s idea of the culture of surveillance (with his notion of the panopticon/prison) to her jottings. Alcott feels privileged that the children take her for the “mayoress” and then revels in her charitable acts of giving candy and dolls to the orphaned and sick

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children. In visiting “the idiot house,” she seems enthralled that one addled French girl singing the Marseillaise “was so overcome by her new doll that she had an epileptic fit on the spot.” After giving away two hundred dolls “and a soap-box of candy,” Alcott is delighted that the children’s “sticky faces beamed” at her and her Quaker guide and waved after them as if they were “angels who had showered goodies on the poor souls.” Indeed, Alcott looks forward to visiting the Tombs with her guide on New Year’s for, Alcott exclaims, “I like this [type of friendly visit] better than parties, etc.” Though not purposely dehumanizing, her discourse, nonetheless, makes the visit to the poor a dramatic spectacle, where she plays the part of the beneficent lady. At times, in her children’s holiday fiction, Alcott is acerbic, as if to suggest that the poor brought on their condition themselves. Or, at other times, she is patronizing, as if to suggest that the kind of middle-class beneficence she represents is far more important to consider than the suffering of the poor or the amelioration of the conditions of the impoverished classes. Oftentimes the well-meaning young benefactors of the stories are rewarded far more amply than the impoverished child whom they help out of a sense of duty, but not exactly out of love—as when the March girls in Little Women are rewarded for giving a Christmas breakfast with a sumptuous dessert provided by their benefactor, Laurie’s wealthy grandfather. Sometimes, in Alcott’s most sentimental mode, she romanticizes the plight of the poor and aestheticizes the poor “pretty” child, thus removing any potentially activist responses from the readers. To be sure, Alcott was never so much given to sentimentalism that she forgot the seamy side of life. It may be that she was trying to distance herself from her own childhood of poverty when she casts off her fictional poor in favor of the well-behaved middle-class protagonist or reader, or that it was cathartic to think of herself as a redemptive figure, even though she was only a step above those poor people she would help: the latter attitude is certainly evident in her visit to the poor orphans at Randall’s Island. As Peter Stoneley has noted, “Alcott explores the drama of poverty from a middle-class point of view. She uses her fiction to redelineate the social boundaries that her real family was in danger of blurring” (1999: 24).3 Alcott and the Web of Charity Alcott, caught between antebellum and postbellum culture, between the age of True Women and New Women, and between sentimentalism and realism, also found herself caught between the age of homespun charity and private giving and an emerging “scientific” philanthropy and outdoor relief or institutional charity that was increasingly suspicious of the poor.4 An understanding of contemporaneous philanthropic practices is essential for a proper understanding of Alcott’s stories about poverty. Two movements toward the end of the nineteenth century succeeded in dehumanizing, even demonizing, the poor, and in distancing the financially solvent individual (the upper or middle

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class) from the poverty-stricken individual. Social Darwinism, which grew out of Herbert Spencer’s notion of the “survival of the fittest,” suggested that the poor deserved what they got and blamed the poor’s misfortune on sloth or immorality. Based upon Darwin’s ideas of natural selection, Spencer spoke out against poor laws and government aid to the poor, insisting that the poor needed to be weeded out because they were unfit: “The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better” (Hofstadter 1944: 41). An ardent disciple of Spencer, William Graham Sumner became the most influential social Darwinist in the United States. In his influential treatise, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883/1989), he reiterates emphatically that self-interest is best for society: “Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is, to take care of his or her own self. This is a social duty” (p. 98). Dispassionately he describes the “natural” plight and punishment of the poor: “Nature’s remedies against vice are terrible. She removes the victims without pity” (p. 114). It was a common sentiment among leaders of late nineteenthcentury charitable organizations that “To solve the problem of poverty, character flaws and moral illnesses of the poor had to be weeded out and replaced with virtue, industry, and thrift” (Tice 1998: 21). Thus, the poor were seen as degenerate and responsible for their plight. The second drastic change in poverty relief emerging at the time was the attempt to centralize disparate charity societies—under a system which came to be known as “scientific charity.” Charitable organizations became more corporate as they dealt less with human interactions and more with bureaucratic fact-finding, data-collecting, and record-keeping about those who receive the benefits of charity. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the so-called “friendly visiting” among the poor was conducted by volunteers only and those paid were the staff members who worked in institutional (often government) offices. Proponents of scientific charity were impressed that “the charitable instinct was being disciplined, the head was triumphing over the heart, the ‘machinery of benevolence’ was coming to be understood and usefully operated” (Bremner 1988: 86). Moreover, advocates of the charity organization society movement attacked traditional practices of charity and almsgiving as being sentimental and indiscriminate” (Tice 1998: 20). There was, at times, a rationale for gift-giving, if done under the proper circumstances, usually as part of a personal transaction that ennobled the benefactor. Herbert Spencer in his later writings tried to soften his earlier brutal diatribes against the poor: “Spencer was compelled to insist over and over again that he was not opposed to voluntary private charity to the unfit, since it had an elevating effect on the character of the donors and hastened the development of altruism” (Hofstadter 1944: 41). Thus, the giver would be ennobled by his charitable practices, but that was the main end—to make the giver feel better about himself. When a disillusioned Charles Loring Brace wrote his study of poverty, The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872), he seems less than sympathetic as he shows how the cycle of poverty is perpetuated—that the poor “have almost

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lost their energy of character, and all power of industry” (p. 384) and are demoralized by their dependence on alms and charities, and thus are “often worse off than if they had never been helped” (p. 385). Brace was averse to the practice of outdoor relief because it forced recipients to manipulate the charity societies, but he sometimes condones private acts of giving: “private alms, though more indiscriminately bestowed, and often on entirely unworthy objects, do not . . . leave the same evil effect as public” (p. 392). There was more of personal connection in the earlier sense of gift-giving that Brace finds preferable and more ennobling: “The influence of the giver’s character may sometimes elevate the debased nature of an unworthy dependent on charity. The personal connection of a poor creature and a fine lady is not so bad as that of a pauper to the State” (p. 392). Brace felt that the system of alms was abused and that one needed to be vigilant in giving alms too easily: his objective was to foster independence and productivity among the poor through education and employment (p. 397). Though of a kinder disposition than other reformers, Brace does still condone visits by charity bureaus to ascertain whether the poor are worthy to receive aid: “Cases of poverty and misfortune might be visited and examined by experts in charity, and the truth ascertained, where ordinary individuals, inquiring, would be certain to be deceived” (p. 386). It is the same culture of invasive privacy that Alcott inadvertently advocates. Alcott, the writer for young middle-class readers, was not totally above the condescending attitude of many of her middle-class audience toward the poor as an evil element, pariahs, somehow partly to blame for their misfortune, and never ever to be trusted entirely. However, just as her family was respectable in its genteel poverty, she also depicted the poor, who upheld middle-class values and virtues, with dignity. This shift from sentimental sympathy to a distancing reappraisal of the poor characterizes many adult views of the poor from the antebellum to the postbellum period, and Alcott’s stories for children also reflect this change in attitude. Gregory Eiselein discusses how humanitarianism changed during the Civil War era so that it became “a practice of power” and thus more callous and indifferent (1996: 98–114). According to Walter I. Trattner, “The idea that distress was an individual moral matter was not only revived but strengthened as the wounds of the Civil War were healed and the nation grew and prospered. The poor were held in contempt in an acquisitive society in which wealth became almost an end in itself” (1994: 90). William M. Morgan shows the shortcomings of capitalism as a common theme: “U.S. literary realism shows the failure of humanitarianism, its frustrations and compromises”; “humanitarian longings . . . get compromised by the political expediencies of their age” (2004: 19). In postbellum America, the gendered nature of philanthropy changed, and as Lori Ginzberg demonstrates, postwar benevolence changed its focus from gender to class: postbellum reformers were less concerned about morality (which was the domain of antebellum women’s benevolent work) and more focused on the need “to control the poor and ‘vagrant’” (1990: 5).

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Alcott’s Reformulation of Charity in her Juvenile Fiction In “The Quiet Little Woman” (Young Folks Journal Jan.–Feb. 1874), one of Alcott’s many Christmas stories, the narrator seems to obviate the need for truly helping the poor by making their servitude, a necessity for the capitalistic household, seem positive. The orphan servant, Patty, gets a “home” of sorts and will always be grateful by devoting her life to her employer (in “glad service”). There is a stark difference between the passive and obsequious orphan girl, the “Quiet Little Woman,” and the independent and lively “Little Women” of the genteel March family. For the small attention of her employer’s family, Patty, the obsequious little woman, envisions “Not a splendid future, but a useful, happy one—‘only a servant’ perhaps, yet a good and faithful woman” (p. 25). Louisa May Alcott always felt the effects of impoverishment quite tangibly (on a personal level, working as a domestic), and certainly that might have made her empathetic to the plight of the poor.5 As Peter Stoneley has pointed out, she oftentimes felt humiliated by her dowdy clothing early in her career: “Even in radical circles, Alcott’s poverty made her feel a loss of social mobility” (1999: 23). When she was able to afford more gentrified clothes, she tried not to buy into the new emerging culture of “conspicuous consumption”: however, “she did acquiesce in a culture in which class was signified by expensive selfpresentation, spending more on clothes in a year than her cook earned in a year” (p. 27). Though Little Women (1868) did bring some modicum of financial security, Louisa May Alcott, to her death, was always thinking of stories or serialized novels to contribute to journals in an attempt to make money. When Mary Mapes Dodge, the progressive and feminist editor of one of the most prestigious and sophisticated children’s periodicals, St. Nicholas, requested a serialized novel of Alcott in 1886, Alcott notes rather languidly in her journal, “Want a great deal of money for many things; every poor soul I ever knew comes for help, and expenses increase. I am the only moneymaker, and must turn the mill for others, though my own grist is ground and in the barn” (July 1886). Even the enlightened Mapes Dodge felt the compromised position of her journal, St. Nicholas, and the need to negotiate between various classes. Janet Gray discusses the mixed messages and hidden agenda of Dodge’s juvenile periodical: While Dodge’s negotiated childhood does offer to gentility some mechanisms of self-criticism and adaptation, it also outlines a specifically bourgeois space, drawing a line between “us” and “them,” those who cannot afford the autonomous space of childhood but whose otherness helps to support the enclosure around those who can. (2004: 214) It is obvious that the inculcation of values in the children’s periodicals involves keeping social stratification alive—for the sake of the empowered class. Alcott’s contributions to St. Nicholas were meant to inculcate the middle-class with virtuous feelings toward the underclass—but they often ended up being

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more a lesson in good manners than in real empathy or social awareness. In the holiday story, “Grandmama’s Pearls” (St. Nicholas, Dec. 1882), Alcott portrays the need for “modesty, obedience, and self-denial” among three young sisters, who forfeit baubles and accolades, to help the poor. They are rewarded amply for their trials of self-sacrifice and charity by a benevolent and wise grandmother, who finds them deserving of the material objects they had forsaken and regales them with meaningful presents on Christmas morning. This is similar to the introductory chapters of Little Women, where the March girls bemoan their sad lot in life (not receiving Christmas gifts) and then turn to a charitable practice, after Marmee reminds them of the starving Hummel family with too many children, and empathic Beth leads in the chorus to bring the Hummels their Christmas breakfast. The girls enjoy the feeling of being charitable, once the Hummel children worship them: “The girls had never been called angel children before, and thought it very agreeable” (p. 16). Shortly afterwards, the girls are regaled by the neighbor, old Mr. Lawrence, who sends over a sumptuous spread (of ice cream and bon-bons) and an assortment of hothouse flowers. In the Alcott canon, middle-class children who learn to give are the victors in society, as they thrive and get repaid for their beneficence, and material rewards beget more material rewards. Many middle-class writers, promulgating middle-class myths about American success, often took the sight of the poor as a personal affront to their own value as individuals. These writers used the poor as objects of cautionary tales—to show individuals what might happen if they were to become lazy or dependent in a society which promoted strong individualism and the Protestant work ethic. The idea was that work brought material gains, and sloth brought poverty and disorder. Samuel Goodrich, founder of the juvenile periodical, Robert Merry’s Museum, preached about “Labor and Property” in January 1841, All the things we see around us belong to somebody; and these things have been got by labor or working. It has been by labor, that every article has been procured. If nobody had ever done any labor, there would have been no houses, no cultivated fields, no bread to eat, no clothes to wear, no books to read, and the whole world would have been in a poor and wild state, not fit for human beings to live happily in. From this passage, one can infer that the social evil of poverty is brought on by the slothful individual, and the poor wreak havoc with civilization. The poor are really of no consequence; they merely serve as a springboard to reflect complacently upon one’s self-imagined goodness or one’s superior status in life. Alcott’s contradictory feelings about charity are apparent in an unsigned sketch Alcott wrote for Merry’s Museum in 1867, entitled “Living in an Omnibus: A True Story,” the forerunner to the Hummel episode in Little Women.6 In this sketch, the father of a poor German family has died, and the family takes up their

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residence in an old abandoned omnibus. The narrator’s reaction is typical: it is at once inquisitive and probing, as she wants to see how the other half lives. What Eiselein has commented about the voyeuristic pleasures offered to the hospital nurse in Alcott’s “A Nurse’s Story” is true also of the philanthropic person or the young reader of charity stories: “patients are not only ‘helpless children’ under humanitarian care” but “also the objects of the agents’ gaze” (1996: 112). The prying do-gooder narrator of “Living in an Omnibus” begins to want to “see this queer house” of the vendor/boy who told her his sad story as he was selling her chips. Like an insensitive “friendly visitor” to the poor or the emerging social worker, she invades the boy’s and family’s privacy by asking him to “show me this funny house of yours and tell me your name.” As Eiselein has said in the context of Alcott’s Civil War stories, such a voyeurism represents an unequal power balance between the disenfranchised and the empowered (pp. 96–114).7 In Alcott’s “Living in an Omnibus”, not only the house, but the family name, seems to be public property in the narrator’s eyes. She decides to go with him and “perhaps help the poor woman [his mother], if she seemed honest” (emphasis mine). This fear and disdain that the poor were somewhat dishonest or dissembling about their poverty or evil and thus worthy of their poverty is typical for this age. Then, instead of bringing nutritious food to the family, the narrator buys “a trace of nice little cakes” (sweet but hardly nourishing) which the little boy, Fritz, was eyeing. The story is a series of blunders the middle class makes in performing their duties, or “friendly” visits to the poor.8 Disregarding maternal urges among the poor women, the narrator goes so far as to tell the mother that someone might want to adopt one of the six children. And here, too, her personal bias is involved, as she is doing this for personal reasons, “for I rather coveted pretty Lotte.” Finally, when she sees that the mother won’t give up a child, she says no more but “slipped a bit of money into pretty Lotte’s hand, and said good-bye.” It is noteworthy that she chose the prettiest child to adore and present the gift of money to—as if, somehow, the beautiful pauper was more worthy of charity. And she explains away their poverty romantically, “A happier, healthier, busier set I never saw; each had work to do, and did it cheerfully. Often they had cold and hunger to bear, but bore it patiently. . . . I never saw a happier family than those little red-cheeked, yellow-haired Germans, as they gratefully smiled and nodded at me from the steps of that funny omnibus home.” Having had a perfect cathartic experience from this small gesture of benevolence, the narrator feels content to keep the picture of an imagined happy family static in her mind. She does not say she will return with food or provisions but contents herself with the fact that this family perseveres, “they had cold and hunger to bear, but bore it patiently.” The narrator clearer desires a picture of the poor, as Jacob Riis later would, for aesthetic reasons; she will buy the poor vendor’s chips and ingest them as easily and as nonchalantly as the story of the plight of the poor.

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Charitable Trifles: “Let Them Eat Bon-Bons” Just as the wealthy are reminded to throw crumbs at the have-nots on special happy occasions to absolve themselves of guilt, so on Christmas, people of all classes are reminded to think of those less fortunate, those who are lonely and suffering, and so Alcott’s many Christmas or holiday stories that she wrote for children’s periodicals are especially telling in the context of charitable giving. Like many other Americans of her time, she followed the tradition of the Christmas story as “culture-text,” best exemplified by Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, whose purpose was to evoke sympathy for London’s poor.9 Not only was Dickens one of Alcott’s favorite authors (Eiselein and Phillips 2001: 80), but he had toured America in 1842 and 1867, being especially well-received the second time for his Christmas story (Restad 1995: 136; Marling 2000: 137–8). Paul Davis views Dickens’ tale as a tool for reform, the “sledgehammer for the poor” though “wielded with . . . gentleness” (1990: 47); ironically, Dickens, writing about the poor, was also in financial straits when he wrote A Christmas Carol in 1842. Scrooge is redeemed by his charity and thus “will achieve a kind of immortal life within this life, an immortality of charity” (p. 81); his charity corresponded in the late Victorian period with “an image of human interdependence and sharing” (p. 83). If not obligatory, alms-giving or giftgiving could be symbiotic and beneficial to both the giver and the recipient (as Sumner, above, also describes altruism). Alcott’s depiction of giving is more ambivalent and in keeping with Penne L. Restad’s reading of Scrooge: “The story’s message had more to do with Scrooge’s rescue from a solitary and miserly life than it did with the Cratchits’ poverty of hard currency. The story’s real patron proved to be Cratchit, and the wealthy, miserable Scrooge, the recipient” (1995: 139). From this point of view, even the rich are rewarded for their benevolent gestures, as the poor are seen as vehicles to their redemption. Alcott seems to affirm, unwittingly, Spencer’s individualistic and Darwinian view of charity—and the Dickensian individualistic act of giving. Also, at a time where charitable institutions were being professionalized and bureaucratized, Alcott juxtaposes new scientific practices of giving to earlier more benevolent patterns of communal charity and “friendly visits.” Perhaps one of the reasons Christmas stories were popular was that one could do one kind gesture once a year, feel good about oneself, and then indulge oneself in a picture of munificent charity. As William B. Waits has stated, though it was admirable that prosperous parents encouraged their children to be generous to the poor at Christmas time, it was not enough: “advantaged children were trained only for private, individual beneficence on one day of the year rather than being encouraged to take organized, year-round action” (1993: 168). In fact, such well-to-do parents often were trying to teach their children a lesson in balancing a rapacious spirit with social consciousness, so the generous display was more for the benefit of the prosperous child. Historians writing about American Christmas practices have noted the self-congratulatory and ephemeral

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aspect of Christmas-giving—and the spectacle of the poor, as the prosperous gave gifts or dinners, or paid friendly visits, was part of the event. Alcott’s Christmas stories for children were especially anticipated every year, and what better time to spread the good word about charitable and generous feelings. In two of these published for Harper’s Young People, “Bertie’s Box, A Christmas Story” (1884) and “Little Robin” (1886), social dilemmas are overcome through the charitable nature of a child or tragedies are averted by a child’s bravery. Indeed, the idea of charity could be further romanticized if it were performed by the image of an innocent child. In “Bertie’s Box,” a middle-class child saves the day by sending his Christmas presents and other goodies to three poor neighborhood children. The story ends with a Dickensian blessing for the generous young benefactor, Bertie Field, by the recipients of his charity: “God bless our dear little Santa Claus and send him many Christmases as happy as the one he has made for us!” (p. 204). In some stories, the poor children are seen as heroic, if they save the day for the lost or injured rich children; indeed, they are rewarded with a Christmas token, but there is no sense that the charitable giving continues throughout the year. In Alcott’s “Little Robin,” a twelve-year-old girl who lives with her grandmother and runs errands to make money for the impoverished household becomes the savior of the rich. One Christmas, she is able to save two children who got lost and became half-frozen on a sledding jaunt and is rewarded for her bravery and good deed with a decorated Christmas tree, Christmas food, and new clothing. In another story, “A Christmas Turkey, and How It Came” (Harper’s Young People, Dec. 1885), poor Kitty saves a little boy who has crashed onto the icy pavement, and the boy’s wealthy family rewards her amply for her service. They purchase the wreaths she is trying to peddle off, and they “tucked some bonbons, a red ball, a blue whip, two china dolls, two pairs of little mittens, and some gilded nuts into an empty box” (p. 117) for her baby sisters. If the “bonbons” and “gilded nuts” are gestures of charity, they are obviously not very nutritious (as in “Living in an Omnibus”), and the other gifts can be seen as trifles from the rich people. It is the poor father, the recovering alcoholic, who brings home the more nourishing Christmas turkey. Many of the Christmas stories revolve around the idea of small tokens of generosity on the part of the middle class or rich (gestures which do not really hurt the rich), and though the initial token may be sincere, the poor are always reminded of their lower class or servitude to the upper class. In “Tessa’s Surprises” (Merry’s Museum, Dec. 1868), Tessa, a motherless child (often the case of the impoverished child), tries to play mother to her younger siblings; though her father, an Italian immigrant, is hard-working, the family finds themselves in destitution. Christmas time prompts the twelve-year-old Tessa to reminisce about the kindness of her deceased mother: “she had set her heart on putting something in the children’s stockings, as the mother used to” (p. 92). The continuity of a family Christmas tradition is often seen as a virtue passed down from mother to daughter in the Alcott canon. Tessa stoops to street

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performances, hardly a middle-class custom, in order to earn money for the siblings. (In contrast, the middle-class girl in “The Little Red Purse” (Harper’s Young People, Dec. 1887) who tries to earn money for charity by taking to the street and dancing and playing the tambourine, not acting the part of a good bourgeois child, is promptly punished by her mother, even though she had good intentions.) One particular family finds Tessa’s singing “charming” and invites her and her little sister Ranza to participate in the Christmas pageant at their house. The words of the oldest son of the family bestowing the charity are telling: “Let us see the little girl and if she will do, let us have her, and Tessa can learn our song, and it will be splendid” (p. 99). This borrowing of the baby girl to be the Christmas angel atop the tree and teaching Tessa “our” song suggests that they will be generous to Tessa as long as she learns her obsequious part and performs as they request. The mother, though generous, has “white hands” in juxtaposition to Tessa’s “little grimy ones,” and thus, the mother’s apparent goodness (of the idle leisure class) is questioned. Tessa sings in broken English, and Tommo, her tenement friend, plays for the “little folks to dance,” and they did not “feel shy in spite of shabby clothes” (p. 103). Like black minstrels, these little Italian immigrants play their part for the people in the grand house, and Tessa is rewarded amply, according to the narrator’s last words, by the rich lady’s “benevolence”: “there was no end to Tessa’s Surprises” (p. 104), but because this is a Christmas story, and there are no sequels, it is hard to imagine the repeated gesture of munificence on the maternal lady’s part. In a similar story, “How it All Happened” (Harper’s Young People, Dec. 1880), the children, who have recently lost their father (a variation of the motherless child), finally realize they live in poverty when Christmas comes around, as they look at their pathetic little Christmas tree. The neighbors, Miss Kent and Mr. Chrome, hear the children’s laments and surprise them with a grand tree and Christmas goodies. The children seem content with their lot, and one even exclaims, “On the whole, I think it’s rather nice to be poor when people are kind to you” (p. 171). This attitude clearly is a dubious one that suggests the poor are happy with their lot, if they get a few hand-outs. Indeed, the giving does not seem as if it will last—perhaps it will appear only at Christmastime, for the narrator concludes, “the first fruits of neighborly friendship . . . flourished in that house until another and a merrier Christmas came” (p. 171). One could intuit that Kent and Chrome would perform their charitable duties once a year. Moreover, the more wealthy (or up-and-coming) seem to thrive in this story by performing their one good deed: they have found that “when people once begin to do kindnesses, it is so easy and pleasant, they find it hard to leave off; and sometimes it beautifies them so that they find they love one another very much” (p. 169). This is not to downplay the meaning of the gift or gift-giving in Alcott’s Christmas stories, or in late nineteenth-century attitudes toward the Christmas gift. Certainly, what initiates the action in Little Women is the lack of money to buy Christmas gifts, though the girls do scrounge their money together to buy

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small presents for Marmee and then learn the bigger gift of giving to the Hummels. The gift came to represent a way to bridge the rift between prosperous and poor, to achieve social equality, if only on an abstract level: “Through gifts, Americans mediated the fragile relationship of an increasingly unsettled society. Through charity, they sought at least symbolic solutions to the problems of extreme inequality that threatened social peace and conscience” (Restad 1995: 123). Indeed, immigration, poverty, urbanization, growing capitalistic enterprises, labor upheavals characterized the Gilded Age and created a sense of family instability and insecurity: “Gifts symbolized and helped secure these [family] ties” (p. 125). However, these charitable gestures are symbolic and though they bring comfort to an increasingly destabilized society, they do not solve the problem of inequality. Charles Loring Brace, upon visiting Germany in 1851, was amazed at the closer family ties in Germany compared to those of America. In his book, Home-Life in Germany (1853), Brace decried “the hollow home-life in many parts of America (Nissenbaum 1996: 220) and praised the German custom of Christmas gift-giving, which he felt was far more sincere than the parallel American custom. He was in awe of the Berlin innkeeper “who was hopelessly in debt” but who came home with “an armful of presents” and surprised that even the poorest family had a Christmas tree (pp. 221–2). Brace lauded the German close-knit family and blamed American unhappiness and feelings of homelessness on an overdeveloped sense of individualism, and so advocated gift-giving in America as a way to achieve the close-knit family ties and to allay anxieties about social instabilities. Alcott’s Christmas stories attempt to bridge the gap between the classes through the gift (as the Hummels, Marches, and Laurences are all connected in the first Christmas scene of Little Women), if only momentarily or symbolically; ultimately, a false sense of security is wrought through this gift-giving. Moreover, it was thought that the delicate family structure, threatened by the ever-increasing capitalist enterprise, could be protected, ironically enough, through what would become most commercialized in the later decades of the nineteenth century (through the growth of department stores)—the material object, the gift. Alcott is also aware of the danger of bestowing gifts unwisely, to rich and to poor—and of the situation of the overpampered prosperous child, who receives too many gifts. There are several stories in Alcott’s Christmas canon, which have the jaded rich child learn the meaning of Christmas-giving in a Dickensian Scrooge way. In “A Christmas Dream and How it Came True” (Harper’s Young People Dec. 1882), Effie, the spoiled rich girl, feels that Christmas is a humbug: “I’m so tired of Christmas I wish there would never be another one!” (p. 181). Her mother accuses her of being like Scrooge and explains the Dickens’ Christmas story. The spoiled rich girl persists that “poor children have better times than rich ones” because beggar girls can go out and walk the streets. The mother tries to show her the reality: “Would you like to be hungry, cold, and ragged, to beg all day, and sleep on the ash-heap at night?” (p. 183). The ungrateful girl still

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glamorizes the plight of the Cinderella poor. When the mother tells her about the happy children she has seen in the Orphan Asylum, who are content with very little, the spoiled Effie simply tells her mother she can bring her toys to the orphan asylum. After having a portentous dream, in the manner of Dickens’ tale, she becomes, predictably, a charitable giver of Christmas presents to the local orphanage and becomes their “good angel.” As Stephen Nissenbaum has written about Christmas charity, “some members of the American bourgeoisie were facing a real Christmas dilemma. Their own children had become jaded with presents” (1996: 246). A solution was to have the prosperous children (such as Effie in Alcott’s story above) form Christmas clubs and organize “Christmas parties for their less-privileged peers, and to give away some of their own old Christmas presents” (p. 246). While the sentiment seems nice, this kind of charity, crassly viewed, would take care of the surfeit of clutter and old unwanted gifts for the well-to-do and give the bored children some sense of purpose (and good organizational skills for their future ventures in capitalistic earning). Another holiday story that has a rather self-centered young rich girl learn the meaning of charity is “The Little Red Purse” (Harper’s Young People Dec. 1887), which tells about Lu’s receiving a red purse for her birthday, a gift that sets her out on a journey of charity. At first, she fantasizes about buying candy and stuffing herself with the “ten bright new cents.” But she meets paupers and a stray dog along the way who teach her the true meaning of giving, and so her allowance is quickly used up. Her mother explains her charity in a problematic way for the reader, “you will have a pleasanter birthday for having made four people and a dog happy, instead of yourself sick with eating too many goodies. Charity is a nice sort of sweetie” (p. 79). The remainder of the story has Lu almost giving in to her candy cravings, having real temptations: “I shall have dreadful trials going by the candy-shops and never buying any” (p. 80). Thus, charity is seen as an odd way to prevent the rich from getting sick on trifles and truffles! She does become terribly ill when she gives into temptation and eats a huge amount of cough drops; she realizes she has been “selfish and silly” (p. 81). As she becomes increasingly more charitable, she literally adopts a poor family; she tells poor little Totty, “you shall be my poor people, and I’ll help you” (p. 83). To help her in that enterprise, her old grandfather, who has become disenchanted with all his money (as too much hard work cost him his health), fills her little purse with money, so that she can bestow the best Christmas upon “her poor family” she has adopted. Still, it seems like a recreational game. As her grandfather, in the vein of a redeemed Scrooge, tells her, “The more I gave away the better I felt”; he praises his grand-daughter for having embarked early “at this pretty game of give-away” (p. 89, emphasis mine). For the wealthy, this charity helps assuage a guilty conscience, or promises more reward in another realm: the grandfather encourages his granddaughter, for she will “have much treasure in the other world where the blessings of the poor are more precious than gold and silver” (p. 89). This complacency is never felt by the recipients of charity in the Alcott stories.

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At times the children in the Christmas stories of poverty are servants or indentured servants, who are taken for granted, until Christmas time. In the previously mentioned “The Quiet Little Woman” (Young Folks Journal Jan.– Feb. 1874), Ella, the spoiled Murray daughter, sees Patty as an object, and not a person: “She’s only a servant, a charity girl who works for her board and wears my old clothes. She’s good enough in her place, but of course she can’t expect to be like one of us” (p. 15). She imagines herself as Cinderella, and unfortunately, she doesn’t leave that role, as she looks forward to a cheery servitude when the family responds with small tokens of affection after their Christmas enlightenment. Similar to this Christmas story is “Becky’s Christmas Dream” (Merry’s Museum Jan. 1870) in which the “little girl from the poorhouse” has six years to serve a farmer’s family. She is perceived as “a good, handy worker” as well as “sly because quiet children sometimes are” (p. 228). The family, returning from Christmas festivities, find that she has made little presents for all of them, and feeling guilty, they change their perception of her. Significantly, the mother “gave the best gift of all” as she bent over to give Becky a kiss; this action is only prompted by thinking about her own children, a common device in the charity stories, “the good woman’s heart reproached her for neglect of the child who had no mother” (p. 233). The farmer, patriarch of the family, moralizes that Becky will do well in serving the family, “a life spent in cheerfully serving others is the best life after all, my little Becky, and we’ll all help to make yours a happy one” (p. 234)—basically promising her a happy bondage. As Restad has written, this Christmas charity was ephemeral and superficial, as it did not get to the core of poverty: “This sentimentalization of ‘worthy paupers’ at Christmas time . . . did not bring into question the essential structure of the market economy that had, if only indirectly, produced their poverty. Indeed, it imbued destitute women and vagabond children with admirable qualities that existed apart from materialism” (1995: 135). The picture of the grateful and happy servant girl, who would not shake up the status quo, is ubiquitous in the Alcott canon. Alcott shows her ambivalence toward the poor—a sympathy mixed with condescension, especially in her Christmas plots. In Little Women, the Hummels, the poor German immigrants, are the source of illness for the charitable March family (because the March family were being a bit too charitable) and epitomize a certain social pestilence. They are inadvertently the cause of Beth’s scarlet fever and subsequent death; it is Beth who witnesses the death of the baby in the squalid Hummel home and who most definitely is scarred emotionally and physically for the remainder of her life. Marmee is concerned since Beth, now an invalid, sings sad songs and obsesses about dead babies. Because Beth has been directly touched by the condition of the Hummels’ poverty, she cannot be released from the web of poverty. In the meantime, Jo and Amy can make light of the Hummel poverty, with Amy saying at one point, after a failed dinner when her friends did not appear and left with an excess of food, that after two days of eating salad and ice cream, she was sick of the food and wished to bring it to the

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Germans for they liked “that kind of mess.” She gives the injunction, “Bundle everything into a basket and send it to the Hummels; Germans like messes. I’m sick of the sight of this, and there’s no reason you should all die of a surfeit because I’ve been a fool” (p. 245). Thus, the poor immigrants become the waste receptacle for the Marches. The cynical adult voice in Alcott’s “Bertie’s Box, A Christmas Story” (1884) representing organized charity, condemns the poor as slothful beggars, and makes an inquest of their probity.10 At the start of the story, Bertie’s mother, Mrs. Fields, secretary of a charitable society, receives a letter from a poor mother, appealing to Mrs. Fields’ maternal instinct. I am so poor that I have nothing for my two little boys on Christmas. I have seen better days, but my husband is dead, my money is gone, I am sick, alone, and in need of everything. But I only ask some small presents for the children, that they may not feel forgotten at this season of universal pleasure and plenty. Your mother’s heart will feel how hard it will be for me to see their disappointment when for the first time in their little lives Santa Claus brings nothing. (pp. 194–5) This letter should evoke sympathy in the maternal middle class, and Alcott’s rendering of such (a literate) letter makes the appeal of the poor more sympathetic, but in the next instance we hear the suspicious voice of the aunt, “It’s only a new and sentimental way of begging. She says she needs everything, and of course, expects you will send money. I hope you won’t be foolish” (p. 189). Though Mrs. Fields agrees not to send money (in case they are being conned), she does agree to send to send some goodies, “It won’t take long to make up a little bundle, and will be no great loss if this women has deceived us” (operative term being “loss” here, as if she has something to lose). Remembering the true sympathetic nature of her mother, Mrs. Fields comments, “My mother used to say it was better to be deceived now and then than to turn away one honest and needy person.” This remembrance of her mother and of a more benevolent time suggests the difference between antebellum and postbellum charity. Mrs. Fields turns away rather casually and remarks, “I only hope I may not forget all about it in my hurry” (p. 195). This rather flip comment suggests that the poor should only appear in one’s imagination when it is convenient. The maternal advice has not fallen on deaf ears. Little Bertie, the enterprising child, has overheard their conversation, unbeknownst to them and has decided to pack up all his best toys and some clothes into a box and send it to the poor family. His story is the story of a middle-class boy who makes good by being charitable: there are no suspicions about his basic good nature. Indeed, his youth serves as a corrective to the women, who have given up the earlier maternal vision of charity, as represented in Mrs. Fields’ being “secretary of our great charitable society” (p. 194).

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The moral becomes quite clear that all good children who learn the value of charity, by forfeiting some of their own material wealth, will reap the benefits of heaven on earth. In other words, good middle-class children will be petted and spoiled even further if they are willing to renounce some of their superfluous possessions. It is a vicious cycle in which money begets money, so that the privileged child, by giving, will only get more. In Alcott’s story, “Grandmama’s Pearls” (St. Nicholas, Dec. 1882), three granddaughters are tested, and through their munificence and short-lived self-deprivation, become even wealthier when their grandmother, in fairy godmother style, bestows more gifts upon them after they passed their test (as in the case of the March daughters when they feed the Hummels and are rewarded by Laurie’s grandfather). Not so in the Alcott stories dealing with the poor children who attempt to be charitable (or just survivors). Though middle-class values inculcated in middle-class children in popular journals sanction the hand of charity, the hand can only be extended so far. If Adam Smith’s invisible hand controlled every capitalistic venture, the visible hand of charity was far less powerful. In many of her rediscovered children’s stories, too, Alcott shows a rather mean-spirited, or at least, cynical view of the working class and of the poor, which makes them appear sneaky and at times at fault for their unfortunate lot in life. In Alcott’s “A Christmas Turkey and How It Came” (Harper’s Young People Dec. 1885), the family’s poverty is explained by the father’s drinking problem; when he gives up drinking, he is perceived “neither cross nor stupid, but looking as he used to look, kind and happy” (p. 118), and so the family can afford a turkey for Christmas. It becomes clear that, for Alcott, rising above one’s station is nearly impossible if one belongs to the working class, and that in a type of Darwinian world, the middle-class children are the heirs to wealth, to happiness, to stable marriages—and finally to heaven. The message to middleclass children in these stories is that they can afford to be charitable since the status quo will reign. The poor of the earth are only the vehicle whereby they can climb higher to a Providential Power who favors the middle class or the rich. Bedtime Stories: Slumbering Middle-Class Children Alcott was not alone in her ambivalence toward the poor. Poverty as a theme ran rampant in children’s stories and essays at the time in periodicals where Alcott published (St. Nicholas, Merry’s Museum, and A Youth’s Companion), and certainly sentimentalism was used as a means by which to teach middleclass children (readers) about this social vice and inculcate them with the right values. Recently, critics have questioned whether sentimental literature for and by women is politically engaging, and the same question can be applied to sentimental fiction for children.11 The aestheticizing of poverty often had a softening and anesthetizing effect on the reader, so one might question its social efficacy. Like the romanticized image of the poor pretty “Lotte” in Alcott’s “Living in an Omnibus,” there are numerous fictional accounts of the pretty little

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poor child. In the anonymous “The Flower Girl” (Youth’s Companion, 19 Sept. 1876), the narrator romanticizes the plight of a poverty-stricken flower-seller, who leaves her job in the marketplace daily to minister, as a Sister of Charity, to the “poor sick people” in the local hospitals. Hearing about the girl’s untimely death from her overwork and martyrdom, the narrator romanticizes the dead victim: “The great blue-veined lids were partly drawn over the eyes that were so like the violets she used to sell.” Her eye color, like the violets, becomes a commodity to be sold. Meanwhile, the narrator is left speechless—a common reaction to the plight of the poor—and he suffers from inertia as he fetishizes the beautiful dead girl: “I could not speak, but I laid the last of my little tokens on her still bosom, and turned away with tears.” The aestheticized poor child is not gender-specific. In Alcott’s “A Christmas Turkey, and How It Came” (Harper’s Young People Dec. 1885), Sammy, the little pauper boy, can draw attention and money through his looks: “no one could look into his blue eyes without wanting to pat his curly yellow head with one hand while the other gave him something” (p. 112). Mrs. Bryant pays him nicely and sends his family a Christmas “basket full of pies, nuts, and raisins, oranges and cake, and—oh, happy Sammy!—a sled for love of the blue eyes that twinkled so merrily” (p. 117). She also has been so generous with him because “the rosyfaced boy” (hardly a true picture of poverty!) reminds her of her deceased grandson—a sentimental ploy often used to inspire pathos among the maternal readers. Similarly, in Alcott’s “Our Little Newsboy” (Merry’s Museum, April, 1868), the narrator dwells upon the pathetic quality of a poor young newsboy, Jack: “Such a little fellow . . . in the big, ragged coat, such a tired, baby-face, under the fuzzy cap; such a purple little hand, still holding fast a few papers” (p. 139). The narrator buys all the boy’s papers when she finds out that the “feller” who takes care of him sometimes beats him for not selling all his newspapers. She also gives Jack a meal and then goes home to tell her nephew, Freddy, the story of the poor newsboy; he responds with the requisite pathos of the typical children’s audience: “‘If I saw that poor little boy, Aunt Wendy, I’d love him lots,’ said Freddy, with a world of pity in his beautiful child’s eyes” (p. 141). The narrator believes that others hearing the story will also be kind to little Jack and implores the parents not to pass such a small paper boy by, but to imagine their own children in his place, and so empathize and buy his paper, “even if you don’t want it” (p. 141). Though sweet and optimistic, this ending does not offer concrete ways in which to help the poor, and again, the tale is centered on the response of the “beautiful” middle-class “child’s eyes.” The aesthetics of poverty demands a numbing sensibility and false tears from its audience or an anger that arouses disdain toward the poor, who, we have seen, are often depicted as “deserving” their fate because of some basic character flaw (laziness, deceit, nonconformity). If the poor do not become the sacrificial lambs of the reader’s imagination, they are rendered exemplary types to be contrasted with consumerist middle-class youth, who have gone astray through vanity and avarice. For example, “Working Girls,” appearing in Robert Merry’s Museum

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(1863) juxtaposes the “happy” hard-working girls with “cheeks like the rose, bright eyes, and elastic step” with unnatural girls “who do nothing but sigh all day, and live to follow the fashions . . . who are languid and lazy from one week’s end to another.” The anguish of the real working girl is glossed over in an attempt to serve as a cautionary tale for the middle class. It seems as if every issue of Youth’s Companion (at least one selection, often the lead story) deals with the plight of the poor child, sometimes immigrant, sometimes not, and attempts to foster a false sense of sympathy—so that the well-mannered middle-class protagonist (or reader) feels much better about himself for his slight attempt at giving to the poor. Through a sentimentality that evokes pity but not social activism, the middle-class reader’s sense of self is bolstered through imagined acts of charity. If the poor child acted in a genteel manner and adhered to bourgeois values, she could ward off the disgrace of poverty, but the privileged child would not feel that poverty was tantamount to godliness. As cautionary tales, Alcott’s stories of poverty suggest that working hard and keeping faith will stave off the hardships that the poor suffer; the drama is meant not to encourage social consciousness but to inculcate capitalist values in the middle-class child. Obviously, the picture of charity that emerges is similar to that shared by adults of this time period. This postbellum era was characterized by vehement rhetorical battles on the nature of charity—and national debates about which poor were worthy of charity—and by an emphasis on material success in the Darwinian milieu of winners and losers, with the underlying message that the underclass is necessary if one is to have the successful capitalists; in some ways, it was necessary to retain the status quo of haves and have-nots. The sympathy felt for the poor should send the child/reader to bed thinking about what a good child he is for having his heart-strings so touched by the misery of the poor—and though it has a slumbering effect, it also accounts for a slumbering charity. Notes 1

2

In frustration, Abba quit her job as social worker after realizing that the charity organizations were more intent on providing sympathy rather than real help: “contact with Boston’s growing poverty, and . . . the exploitation of poor girls and women, set [Abba’s] own struggles in perspective. She no longer viewed the Alcott family’s distress as unique; nor did Louisa” (Sarah Elbert 1987: 97). Philanthropic visits to hospitals, orphanages, asylums, and prisons were common for society’s fashionable set, especially around Christmas. Indulging in this voyeuristic ritual, Margaret Fuller, as a reporter for the New York Tribune, visited the almshouse and asylum on Blackwell’s Island and the Asylum for Discharged Female Convicts in NY (2000). Stephen Nissenbaum believes the catharsis of these Christmas visits extended vicariously to the readers of such accounts (1996: 248).

Louisa May Alcott’s Christmas Stories 3

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Though it was perhaps Alcott’s own experience with poverty which made her appreciate the impoverished she encountered, there is an undeniable sense of rancor and condescension as well to the protagonists of the underclass. Stephanie Foote (2005) examines the resentful attitude of the March family, especially the very intense rage of Jo March and the repressed rage of Marmee, in the face of the social humiliation caused by their poverty. While writing Little Women, Alcott was caught “between old style-virtuous domesticity and a new-style lavishness” (Brodhead 1993: 96). Middle and upper class became more delineated: “In 1868 the middle-class audience” had to redefine itself “against another threatening adjacency—the emerging leisure class world of the postbellum years” (p. 95). Contrasting with her juvenile fiction, Alcott’s essays about poverty attack the wealthy more stridently. See “A New Way to Spend Christmas” (Youth’s Companion, March 1876), in which she describes the “blight of poverty.” Despite the occasional sentimentalizing (“I longed to take these young creatures into some safe corner to grow up in the sunshine and pure air they needed” (p. 266)), similar to that displayed by Charles Loring Brace during his orphan train project, her tone throughout is more naturalistic and biting. She notes how “there was no hand to grasp” (p. 269) the doll she attempted to give an orphaned girl, who moaned continuously, “cursed with inherited afflictions too dreadful to describe” (p. 269) and that “bonbons” brought no happiness “for in that mouth even sweets were bitter” (p. 269). Despite the same readership in both instances, suffering is not minimized here as in the children’s fiction, although an emphasis on the visitors’ charity remains evident in the saint-like description of the guide (with “a sort of halo ‘round [her] little black bonnet”) who “visited the poor children in these various refuges, taking upon herself the duty of seeing that this holiday is not forgotten but kept as it should be, with goodies, gifts, kind words, and a motherly face to make sunshine in a shady place” (p. 266). Alcott was editor briefly in 1868 before that periodical became Youth’s Companion; later this sketch appeared in longer form as “The Autobiography of an Omnibus” in Youth’s Companion Oct. 1874. Cf. Christine Doyle, who sees Alcott’s tone as “satirical . . . in the hope of effecting change” (2000: 38) rather than mean-spirited. In describing antebellum “friendly visits,” Paul Lewis concludes relevantly “poor visit reports frequently reveal more about the judgmental middleclass visitors than about the impoverished hosts” (2002: 247). See Debra Bernardi’s (2005) discussion of Mary Freeman’s treatment of invasive postbellum public relief and paupers’ attempts at dignity in the face of social workers’ “friendly visits.” A Christmas Carol exemplified the mythology of “the country as the place of simple innocence and the city as the seat of corruption and vanity”

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Monika Elbert (Davis 1990: 36). Two of Alcott’s “Christmas” stories also show the country as a site of innocence and charitable values. In “Kate’s Choice” (Hearth and Home Jan. 1872), an orphan elects a life of simple virtues with her grandmother in the country, becoming the grandmother’s “angel in the house.” Similarly, “A Country Christmas” (The Independent Dec. 1881) distinguishes between gentrified city dwellers and simple country folk in the heroine’s choice to live with country relatives: “I am very happy here, and so tired of the frivolous life I lead in town, that I have decided to try a better one” (p. 276). Ironically, the poor child in the Alcott canon is always sure to follow the rules, whereas the wealthier child can afford to be transgressive. In “Tilly’s Christmas” (Merry’s Museum, Jan. 1868), a middle-class girl brags that she will get many presents for Christmas, but she wishes to “find a purse full of money” anyway. Tilly, the poor girl, finds an injured bird and is overjoyed that she can resist temptation: “I’d rather have the bird than the money . . . The purse wouldn’t be mine, and I should only be tempted to keep it; but this poor thing will thank and love me” (pp. 173–4). For her goodness, she is ultimately rewarded by a generous neighbor, on Christmas Day, with blankets, clothes, and a food basket. See, for example, De Rosa (2003) and Shaker (2003). Caroline Levander maintains that both sentimental and realistic narratives promote bourgeois values: “Little Men shows how the scientific models of evolution that realist writers and critics often distinguish from sentiment actually work to reinforce the hegemony of sentiment’s bourgeois ideals by claiming that other identities are ‘unnatural’ and therefore undesirable” (2000: 44).

Chapter Three “Hints Dropped Here and There”: Constructing Exclusion in St. Nicholas, Volume I Janet Gray and Melissa Fowler

The founding of St. Nicholas: Scribner’s Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls in 1873 marked the ascendancy of the Romantic construction of childhood as a space of innocent playfulness, and a corresponding program for children’s literature that replaced the direct moralizing of earlier children’s literature with an emphasis on fun. A children’s magazine, according to editor Mary Mapes Dodge, was to be a “pleasure-ground” (Scribner’s Monthly July 1873: 14). Dodge acknowledged that “a great deal of instruction and good moral teaching may be inculcated in the pages of a magazine,” but the method should not mar the spirit of play. Instruction should be done “by hints dropped incidentally here and there” (p. 17). Oddly, the first issue of St. Nicholas opens with a poem that seems unsuited to the magazine’s mission: The Woodman and the Sandal-Tree Beside a sandal-tree a woodman stood And swung the axe, and, as the strokes were laid Upon the fragrant trunk, the generous wood, With its own sweets, perfumed the cruel blade. Go, then, and do the like; a soul endued With light from heaven, a nature pure and great, Will place its highest bliss in doing good, And good for evil give, and love for hate. William Cullen Bryant (p. 2)

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A poem that is half sermon is hardly inconspicuous in its instruction. Its strangeness as a herald of the pages to follow, however, comes not merely from its didacticism. The quatrains fit awkwardly: drawn into a violent scene, the young reader is directed to identify morally not with the (masculine) axewielding human agent but with the (feminized) nonhuman wood, whose only agency involves exuding perfume when struck—a strangely passive analogy for the values St. Nicholas was to transmit. The editorial mission of St. Nicholas corresponds to bourgeois adaptation of Romantic views of childhood. Romantic pedagogical theory reached the United States in the 1820s through followers of Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), who advocated loving, interactive instruction rather than “rote” (1951: 35). Pestalozzi’s views did not enjoy wide acceptance until the postbellum era, when a rising middle class embraced Romantic childhood as a balm for anxieties about the increasing regimentation of the public sphere with the advance of capitalist modernity (Gray 2004: 195). Instruction in St. Nicholas involved a sociopolitical agenda: to ensure the continuity of traditional upper-middle-class values by shaping children’s characters (Kelly 1984: MacLeod 1994). Its mission stemmed from that of its parent publication, Scribner’s Monthly, which catered to a morally conservative audience whose values were deeply rooted in family, country, religion, and capitalism. In the 1870s, the stability and values of the upper-middle class were threatened by political tensions between the North and the South as well as changes in the country’s economy that widened the gap between rich and poor. Unassimilated, economically disadvantaged masses of immigrants burdened urban areas. A depression was underway, and the future seemed uncertain (Gannon and Thompson 1992: 105). The mission of St. Nicholas represented a strategy of cultural retrenchment. St. Nicholas would cultivate its young readers as future members of the middle class, guiding their development, fostering their values, and ministering to their prosperity (p. 107). Upper-middle-class values would trickle down: the lower-middle classes would assimilate them and, in turn, transmit them to those below. Thus, St. Nicholas authors were not simply to expose young readers to literature, but to perform feats of social engineering. The magazine’s editorial challenge was to fulfill its agenda in an inconspicuous, entertaining fashion, without appearing overtly didactic (Bayma 2003). While class is the most prominent dimension of St. Nicholas’ agenda, gender and race are also constituents. In the mid-nineteenth century, the unisex childhood that once prevailed was giving way to distinct differences between maleness and femaleness that reflected changes in the gender roles of adults. With industrialization and expansion, men were to venture into a society that now valued masculine “entrepreneurship, business acumen, and professional skills,” while women were to assume responsibility for the home (Murray 1998: 67). Novels for boys required adventure, with moral lessons subtly incorporated through action and adventure (p. 67). Novels for girls “privileged the home and family,” featuring female protagonists who experienced moral improvement

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or served as catalysts for others’ development (Murray 1998: 54; Fowler 2003). Race is the most pervasively constitutive social dimension of Dodge’s project, although least articulated. Literary whiteness—the assumption that both reader and writer are white (Morrison 1993)—characterized the entire project; indeed, literary whiteness would not be substantially challenged in children’s periodicals until the 1920s, when the NAACP published The Brownies’ Book under the guidance of W.E.B. DuBois (Nardone 2003). After the collapse of Reconstruction, plantation literature—much of it written for children—would serve as a cultural support for segregation by reinventing the antebellum South as a happy world, masking the terrors of national division while justifying the continuity of white dominance. The first volume of St. Nicholas includes several pieces that anticipate plantation literature (Gray 2004: 220–32). In a graduate seminar on the construction of childhood in nineteenth-century American children’s literature, the authors of this chapter1 recuperated selected texts by canonical and forgotten authors from the twelve monthly installments of the first volume of St Nicholas, seeking to illuminate the sociopolitical dimensions of Dodge’s editorial agenda. Four of Bryant’s fable-verses, all structured like “The Woodman and the Sandal-Tree,” appear in the volume. “The Last Pie” by Alice Chadbourne contrasts to Bryant’s didacticism: with no stated moral, this humorous tale seems thoroughly compatible with Romantic pedagogy. Examples of the role of class include an abridgement of Gulliver’s Travels by Donald Grant Mitchell and Louisa May Alcott’s “Roses and ForgetMe-Nots.” Dodge’s column “Books for Boys and Girls” and “Anna’s Doll” by Lucretia Peabody Hale exemplify gender differences in children’s reading. “Jim Crow” by Annabel Lee references race. We found gaps between story and lesson everywhere in these selections. Susan R. Gannon notes a “lamentable” tendency in Scribners’ publications to universalize genteel biases about class, gender, and race (2004: 48–9). However, these attitudes in St. Nicholas are much more than “blind spots”; they are the very fabric of Dodge’s project. Our readings show that the hinted messages in St. Nicholas’ spirited rhymes and playful tales construct exclusionary boundaries around and through genteel white childhood. Further, the instructional value of playfulness as Dodge’s authors envision it depends upon vicarious displacement of the very qualities St. Nicholas claims to celebrate. Playfulness and imagination are suspect, made up of lies, blunders, and excesses, and young readers’ access to them depends upon their having literary access to excluded others. The four verse translations of Spanish fables by William Cullen Bryant in the first volume of St. Nicholas (Nov. 1873) observe the fable genre with an opening quatrain telling a story about things or animals and a closing quatrain that unfolds the moral logic of the story. Like their author, who was nearing the end of his distinguished literary career, the fables seem to belong to an earlier era. Other Spanish fables had entered the lives of antebellum children through the prose translations of Lydia Maria Child, who included two of them

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in A Girl’s Own Book (1833). Child risked including games and active exercise in her book, but she disapproved of fun for fun’s sake—for example, she scorned Mother Goose rhymes (Gray 2004: 193). Her overall agenda was didactic as well as gendered; for girls, domestic economy, mental improvement, and refinement weighed nearly as heavily as “holier” duties (Child 1833: iii–iv). The fables she chose model feminine conduct, teaching girls to excel in accomplishments and “adorn” their surroundings (p. 254–5). Bryant’s fables outdo Child’s in their piety, rooting the morals in biblical truths (Fazio 2003). In “The Woodman and the Sandal-Tree,” the chopped tree’s perfume exemplifies the command to return evil by doing good (Romans 12:21). In “The Hidden Rill” (St. Nicholas Jan. 1874: 136), an unseen flow of water nourishes greenery and flowers, demonstrating the command to give charity secretly (Matthew 6:1–4). In “The Eagle and the Serpent” (St. Nicholas July 1874: 506), a snake envious of an eagle’s “lofty place” crawls up a mountain, demonstrating the warning that evil people may prosper (Psalm 73). “The Cost of a Pleasure” (St. Nicholas Feb. 1874: 177) describes the cost in dewdrops of a rose’s blossoming, corresponding to the tears that follow an ill-got pleasure (Psalm 51). According to Gannon, Dodge published these poems because Bryant was a friend of her father and she had to rely on her contacts to fill the early issues (2004: 30). Even so, Dodge’s prominent placement of “The Woodman and the Sandal-Tree” in the first issue indicates that, despite their sermonizing, Bryant’s poems suited Dodge’s project. She would not have needed to compromise the magazine’s mission from the start. In her prospectus for a children’s magazine, Dodge called for writing that surprises “the child-mind . . . with an electric recognition of comic incongruity” (p. 13). She had access to filler that better fit this description, most abundantly her own verse for children, which she placed elsewhere throughout the first volume. Free of moralizing, Dodge’s topsy-turvy verse exemplifies the emerging currency of nonsense as a mode for children. Bryant’s fables suit the St. Nicholas mission by registering its continuity with the letters and pieties of the past—its underlying conservatism. And, although less fun than nonsense, fables do require children to read with active, improvisatory minds. To grasp the connection between image and moral, the child reader must pretend that the animal or thing is like a child. This imaginative leap is potentially empowering for the child, since the fabled object has a voice or subjecthood that it should not have; by finding herself in the object’s story, the child, who may be silenced and objectified in the adult world, gains voice and subjectivity. The object has truths to learn, just as the child does, and stands in for the child at a moment of growth. With the aid of the moral, which guides the play of imagination that the images inspire, the child gains mastery over her parallel world by learning from the object’s suffering, secrets, or mistakes (Fazio 2003). For example, the moral in “The Woodman and the Sandal-Tree” instructs the child: “Go, then, and do the like.” To discover

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what she is to emulate, the child must distance herself from a human and identify with a tree, remain untroubled by the tree’s destruction, and come to rest on the pleasantness of its perfume. Bryant’s poems prepare children to protect their well-being, recognizing that, even within their special sphere, children may face hurts, dilemmas, and temptations. The inculcation Bryant’s poems offer suits a benign social agenda of producing good, contented children, occupying their own sphere (Fazio 2003). But the surplus of excluded meanings exposes themes that complicate the St. Nicholas agenda. Through the sandal-tree’s scent Bryant commends to children a passive, feminized virtue. In “The Hidden Rill,” the reader is to discover the moral parallel between flower scents and the “glad looks” of poor, suffering objects of kindness. Readers are to expect results from their supposedly secret beneficence. Reading “The Eagle and the Serpent,” the child must avoid sympathizing with the snake’s suffering if she is to master the moral, which requires that the snake be regarded as unworthy of the eagle’s height. Readers should fear those who strive to raise their status. And dewdrops on roses cannot simply be lovely or nourishing in “The Cost of a Pleasure”; they must be regarded as signs of deserved suffering. Bryant puts readers on guard about pleasure, the very quality Dodge advocated for a children’s magazine. In contrast to Bryant’s fables, Alice Chadbourne’s nostalgic story “The Last Pie” exemplifies the magazine’s adaptation of Romantic pedagogy; indeed, the story improves upon Pestalozzi’s educational maxims. Chadbourne’s story resembles a conduct tale but avoids the narrow regimentation that Pestalozzi shunned. The story’s opening hints that it will convey a lesson; young Annie asks her Aunt Delia to tell another story of her childhood scrapes. Annie’s request sets up an opportunity for a child to learn not from dictated rules, but from an elder’s behavior. The storytelling moment thus joins “the past with . . . the future by making wise use of the present,” as Pestalozzi recommends (1951: 31). For Pestalozzi, “The crowning achievement of education is to reach the child’s heart to convince him of our fervent love at the very moment when we are pointing out mistakes” (p. 33). Chadbourne’s approach is more indirect; she avoids calling attention to Annie’s faults, representing youthful misadventures only through the retrospective wisdom of a loving adult (Walegir 2003). Aunt Delia tells her niece about her childhood blunder of hiding one of her mother’s sacred pumpkin pies. Delia opens her story with praise for the pies: “spicy and sweet, shining and golden . . . and though there were so many, they were sure to disappear in a discouragingly short period of time” (St. Nicholas Nov. 1873: 302). Delia’s intentions are honorable: she hides one pie of a large batch so that she can bring it out just when everyone thinks there are no more. That moment comes with a surprise visit from a male relative. Delia hopes the visitor will be her adventurous uncle, presumed lost at sea, but he is her mother’s Cousin Tom. Describing dinner preparations, Delia draws attention to her mother: “Everybody loved her, she was so bright and genial” (p. 302). The radiant baker expresses regret that the pies are gone. As dinner ends, Delia

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retrieves her pie from its hiding place, only to find it covered with mold. She suffers “an agony of shame and disappointment,” but Tom teases her and she soon joins the adults in “a tempest of glee” (p. 303; Walegir 2003). Aunt Delia does not tell Annie the moral of the story, and Annie offers no comment. Consistent with Pestalozzian method, Chadbourne leaves it to the young reader to discern the lesson. Still, the lesson is elusive. Delia’s scrape does not stand as a warning against misbehavior; no one judges her. Nor is this a lesson in domestic skills. Delia does not direct her niece to become an excellent baker; she herself admits to lacking the skill (Walegir 2003). In place of a moral, Chadbourne hints that children should learn to laugh at their mistakes. Delia’s humiliating mistake is also a lesson in her lack: she wrongly imagines she can outdo her angelic mother by extending the plenitude of her baking. But, in the pleasure-ground, a child is only a consumer; she does not have the power to produce. With the last pie unconsumable, the pleasureground is a space whose laughter marks loss. The child’s doomed effort to re-present a nostalgic pleasure places an unbridgeable gap between a comical present and an idealized and romanticized past. For young readers of St. Nicholas, Cousin Tom’s gleeful teasing is the mode of instruction that endures to reconcile bourgeois children to the shames of their disempowerment. In her column “Books for Boys and Girls,” Dodge advises young readers to read “a good, standard work” between new books, and directs their attention to a series of essays on great writers by Donald Grant Mitchell (St. Nicholas Nov. 1873: 45). With a Yale education and a lineage that traced back to eminent colonial families, Mitchell had both the scholarly background and the pedigree to fulfill the ideological needs of St. Nicholas. Mitchell chose to write about Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan, and Jonathan Swift, authors he regarded as “old friends” from his youth (Kime 1985: 124). To command the reader’s attention, he wrote catchy titles and retold the classic stories in an accessible style. He would interrupt the third-person narrative with first-person comments about the text, thus lending the text a conversational tone, sometimes switching from “I” to “we” as if anticipating his readers’ agreement. His textual interruptions guided readers to a message, establishing the narrator as the all-knowing, paternal authority figure whose values his readers ought to emulate. He would also editorialize about the author. This approach could prove problematic, especially when the text or its writer contradicted St. Nicholas’ sociopolitical agenda (Bayma 2003). In “About Some Queer Little People,” Mitchell gives his readers a succinct abridgement of Gulliver’s Travels, supplemented with an attack on Swift’s character. Mitchell’s approach to Gulliver undermines its satire, replacing the mock-authority of the tale’s supposed sources with his own benign guidance. Mitchell implies that young readers are not to blame if they believe Swift’s tale to be factual. He layers the telling, just as Swift did, by presenting it as Mr. Sympson’s retelling of the account of an adventurer with a reputation for truthfulness. His early interjections highlight details that make the tale

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plausible: ships do break apart when they hit rock, anyone might roar like Gulliver if trapped, and “travelers are apt to” amuse distinguished people (St. Nicholas March 1874: 298). Soon, however, Mitchell’s asides begin to hint at problems with the tale’s credibility. For example, Gulliver and the emperor of Blefuscu inexplicably become friends despite Gulliver’s aiding Lilliput in the war between the two tiny states. The tale, Mitchell finally reveals, is fiction: there was no Gulliver. The author, Dean Swift, “saw, in his own library, everything that Gulliver professed to have seen” (p. 298). The adventures with the queer little people were the product of Swift’s reading. Although Mitchell later points out that Swift’s parents were English, he first identifies Swift as “a queer sort of Irish clergyman” (p. 298), invoking postbellum Irish stereotypes which captured genteel anxieties about an immigrant group that was gaining political clout. Swift had the patronage of distinguished people, a “university education” and a “powerful and acute mind,” but despite these advantages, he “was an utterly selfish man . . . loved by very few” (p. 298). Like the climbing snake in Bryant’s fable, Swift was unworthy of his prominence. Mitchell especially disapproved of Swift’s attacks on the English aristocracy. Swift wrote not for the reader’s amusement, according to Mitchell, but “to ridicule the people he had met about the court of England” (p. 298). Transposed to class divisions in the postbellum United States, Swift’s ridicule of the English aristocracy would apply to the morally conservative upper classes, the standard-bearers for the values Scribner’s and St. Nicholas promoted. To serve the needs of St. Nicholas, Mitchell deflects attention from the historical context in which Swift wrote and undermines his authority as a social critic (Bayma 2003). Yet Mitchell would not wholly exclude Swift from the late nineteenth century. “If he were alive to-day,” Mitchell suggests, “we might . . . have him make our dictionaries . . . or go to Washington for us; but . . . we should never want him to preach Christianity for us, or sit down with us at our firesides” (St. Nicholas Nov. 1873: 298–9). Placed in amoral, masculine domains at a safe remove from the hearth, he could do no harm, but he would have no place in the sphere of sentimental domesticity where ministers and mothers apply moral instruction, and where children read. That Mitchell wrote about Gulliver’s Travels for St. Nicholas in itself seems contradictory, if readers were not to approve of Swift. However, the book’s value lay in its status as a classic. The parents of intended readers would view Gulliver nostalgically as a resource from an idealized past which could cultivate their children’s gentility. The problem is that this classic story appears to be worth retelling solely for the purpose of demolishing it and discrediting its author (Bayma 2003). The demands of the magazine’s class-based moral agenda end in cautioning children to be wary of amusing reading, and the pleasures of Swift’s text become unrecoverable, like Chadbourne’s delicious pie. Louisa May Alcott’s first contribution to St. Nicholas uncovers other complications in the class dimensions of the magazine’s mission. Her tale “Roses and Forget-Me-Nots” masks a subversive critique, registering an ambivalence

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about genteel values that mirrors Alcott’s divided class background. Her mother Abigail descended from colonial gentry but was disinherited when she married Bronson Alcott, the son of a poor farmer. For much of Louisa May’s growing up, her mother was head of the household. As a social worker, Abigail passed on to her daughter the value of compassion for the poor even as she struggled to support her own family (Sansevere 2003; Saxton 1977:176; Marsella 1985: 80). Dodge solicited work from Alcott for the first volume of St. Nicholas. It took Alcott six months to submit a story, although she later contributed regularly. The great success of Alcott’s semi-autobiographical novels beginning with Little Women (1868) had become burdensome to her. She wrote prolifically to meet the demand for her domestic fiction, wearing down her health with overwork (Gannon and Thompson 1992: 133–4). In “Roses and Forget-Me-Nots,” Lizzie, a poor errand girl, delivers a bonnet to Miss Belle, a girl of the upper class (St. Nicholas March 1874: 250–5). Belle takes special interest in Lizzie, who reveals her dream to become a floral artist and confesses that she has stolen a rose from Belle in order to copy it in silk. Belle forgives Lizzie and sends her away with a small bouquet, as well as a pair of rubber boots to protect her from the rain. The boots signify the careless grandiosity of Belle’s charity: they are too large for Lizzie, and she suffers a crippling fall. Five years later, Belle frantically searches the city for forget-menots to match her dress for her first ball. She finds Lizzie, who now makes flowers in her small room. Grateful to Belle for her kindness years earlier, Lizzie provides the wreath and refuses payment; instead, she asks permission to make flowers for Belle’s wedding. In turn, Belle promises to take Lizzie for drives in the fresh air. Alcott lets us know that she keeps her promise and brightens Lizzie’s life (Sansevere 2003). Read as Miss Belle’s story, this is a tale of kindness and friendship; and because the readers would have been in or aspiring to Belle’s class, it matters that Alcott made the story work in this way. She closes with “the helpful little lesson” that taught Miss Belle “to read the faces poverty touches with a pathetic eloquence, which says to those who look, ‘Forget-Me-Not’” (St. Nicholas March 1874: 255). But Alcott tarnishes Belle’s appeal from her first appearance, when she laughs as Lizzie struggles in the rain. Belle’s amusement registers ignorance, and Alcott has Lizzie educate her about what it is like to be poor, knowledge that “turns a new page” in Belle’s happy life (p. 251). As a moral model, Belle offers Alcott’s readers an uneasy recognition of her privilege. As she begs Lizzie to let her take her for rides, she tells her, “I feel idle and wicked when I see busy people like you that I reproach myself for neglecting my duty and having more than my share of happiness” (p. 254). But this insight will not substantially alter her life. Her destiny is to look exquisite; her crises are about shopping. If she is generous, she is also vain and pampered, and remains so throughout the tale. Although Alcott never directly judges Belle, she undermines the selflessness of her gifts: Belle find roses common, hates her boots, and gains a source of free bouquets in exchange.

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It is Lizzie, not Belle, who undergoes a dramatic moral transformation. Lizzie’s story resonates with Alcott’s own childhood hardships, as well as the role her art played in attracting the attention of her economic betters. Further, for Alcott, like the floral artist in her story, service to the upper-class consumer had bodily costs. At the beginning, Lizzie’s desperation to raise her station leads her to crime. Alcott could have presented her fall as the penalty for stealing Belle’s rose, but the story connects the two elements only indirectly. During their second encounter, Lizzie tells Belle that she has never stolen again because Belle’s forgiveness kept her from “greater temptations” (p. 254). Belle has been the agent of Lizzie’s moral gentrification. Yet Belle’s facile condescension has been Lizzie’s literal downfall, the cause of her crippling. Alcott shows that the “trickling down” of upper-class values has a catastrophic cost for the lower class. Lizzie further demonstrates her renovated character by returning charity for charity, but their gifts to one another are not equivalent. Belle gives of her surplus, Lizzie of her very substance—her body, art, and livelihood—signifying her dependency as a producer on Belle’s tasteful consumerism. Boundaries between classes are crossable in only one direction: Belle reaches down and reaps rewards, but for Lizzie the result of reaching up is her further dependency on the kindness of those above her. The interweaving of Lizzie’s and Belle’s stories suggests a subversive bitterness in Alcott’s presentation of a lesson in charity. It also complicates the intersection of femininity and class. Throughout the story, Alcott lavishes descriptors on Belle that make her a near caricature of a fairy-tale heroine. The overdetermination of upper-class femininity, however, depends upon the abjection of lower-class femininity. The illustrator supports this reading by showing Belle standing in front of a full-length mirror adorned with cherubs and holding a hand mirror —endlessly reproducing her angelic image—while Lizzie crouches at her feet, supported by a cane, in a position that suggests adulation (Figure 3.1). If the roses of the title signify Lizzie’s yearning to possess something of upper-class femininity, the encircled forget-me-nots signify a compulsory component of Belle’s construction. Winning the rose, Lizzie wins a role in serving Belle’s heterosexual coming-of-age by making a wreath for the ball, the precursor to her marriage. Children’s literature contributed to the construction of gender by differentiating between boys’ and girls’ reading. As our previous readings have suggested, however, there is more to the gendering of St. Nicholas than the presumable sex of readers. Bryant’s fables cast masculinity as a destructive, instrumental force to which children are to respond with feminine sweetness; endorse flowery, feminine responses to class condescension but disapprove of the serpent’s masculine striving; and cast the feminine flowering of the rose as a sinful pleasure. Chadbourne casts polarized gender types—household angel and adventurer— as inaccessible relics. Mitchell discredits Gulliver’s masculine adventures and bans their author from the feminine sphere. Alcott settles the construction of femininity as an asymmetrical exchange between women of different classes.

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Janet Gray and Melissa Fowler Figure 3.1: From St. Nicholas: Illustration accompanying Alcott, “Roses and Forget-Me-Nots” “Lizzie Knelt Down to Arrange the Airy Skirt.”

A column authored by Dodge, “Books for Boys and Girls,” runs for several early issues of the first volume as an omnibus review of new texts before it shrinks to mere notices. The early columns read as a platform for Dodge’s continuing and sometimes heavy-handed negotiation of her broader project of regulating childhood. She warns readers to look beyond the “gay bindings” of their Christmas books, because Saint Nicholas cannot be trusted to weed out texts that are not “sweet and wholesome” (St. Nicholas Jan. 1874: 174). Fiction is to be a vehicle for success. More important than the journey through “story-land” is the return; a good book motivates a child to “strive and study with a will,” while a bad book overexcites the reader and leaves him discontent with his “humdrum life” (St. Nicholas Dec. 1873: 102). The column is gendered as early as the story-like introduction of the first installment, where Dodge enlists paternal authority to discipline girls’ reading. A young “school girl” tells an “old gentleman” about a “girl-graduate” who is not “spending her time foolishly. She reads all the new books” (St. Nicholas Nov. 1873: 44). The gentleman alerts the girl to the dangers of such reading. While the anecdote serves to direct children to the classics, Dodge’s subsequent reviews suggest that more is at stake in restricting girls’ reading than boys’. She often indicates the gender of readers for whom a book is suited, but her

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recommendations are asymmetrical: boys may read any worthwhile book, but girls are excluded from reading certain titles, particularly adventure tales (Fowler 2003). For example, in her recommendation of Adventures by Sea and Land, Dodge writes, “it will no doubt be given at Christmas to any number of boys” (St. Nicholas Nov. 1873: 45). Romaine Kalbris by Hector Malot “is certain to be read—devoured, we will say—by every boy into whose hands it may fall” (p. 102). She describes Try and Trust; or the Story of a Bound Boy by Horatio Alger, Jr., as “a book for the boys” (p. 102). No parallel body of literature is exclusively for girls. Dodge recommends domestic texts not for girls alone but for “girls and boys alike,” for “young folk,” or for everyone. Lady Green Satin by Baroness E. Martineau des Chesnez offers the lesson that “trust in the good God . . . is just the trust that children, and grown folks too, need everywhere in order to make life bright” (p. 103). Of Brightside by Mrs. E. Bedell Benjamin, Dodge writes, “all our children will be delighted” (p. 103). Not until the third installment of “Books for Boys and Girls” does Dodge mention a strictly female readership. She recommends Giles’ Minority by Mrs. Robert O’Reilly, “whose Doll World is a delight to all real girls and women” (St. Nicholas Jan. 1874: 175). As one of the guiding principles of St. Nicholas, Dodge intended “to prepare boys and girls for life as it is” (St. Nicholas Apr. 1874: 353). The exclusionary language in Dodge’s book reviews prepares children for life by admitting boys to the feminine world but barring girls from the masculine. Further, while Dodge promises that boys will “take in good lessons without knowing it” (St. Nicholas Dec. 1873: 102) from their exclusive reading, boys as well as girls needed the sentimental lessons of domestic fiction. The domestic sphere was the space for all children, male and female, but only boys were to venture forth; a girl had nothing to gain from adventure fiction, which aimed to inspire a boy to travel outside the realm of the domestic (Fowler 2003). Even so, Dodge cautions boys, too, against freely reading what is available— again, placing restrictions on the pleasure-ground. The credibility of adventures is one problem, as it was for Mitchell, but Dodge also judges tales that venture too far from the domestic. For example, Dodge acknowledges the attractions of Adventures by Sea and Land but cautions the boy reader, “judge for yourself whether its astonishing scenes are probable or not.” One tale particularly meets with her disapproval: the hero “goes off on a dangerous journey for the mere love of excitement, and almost to the heartbreak of his young wife, left at home” (St. Nicholas Nov. 1873: 45). Masculinity must be tempered by its continuing connection to the domestic sphere. Lucretia Peabody Hale’s first contribution to Dodge’s project offers boys compensation for their childhood confinement and ongoing obligations to the female world. Hale, a member of an accomplished literary family, became a popular contributor to St. Nicholas with her tales of the comically inept Peterkin family, which she began writing in 1876. Her contribution to the first volume of Dodge’s project, “Anna’s Doll,” could well be a precursor to the Peterkins’

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tales of mishap. It is a story about a doll’s unfortunate losses of her heads. Anna’s older sisters and aunts dote on the doll, frequently buying it accessories, including heads as needed. Little Anna is portrayed as a negligent caregiver. The doll’s first head breaks when “somebody stepped on it, because Anna had dropped it in the front entry” (p. 28). Later, a wax replacement head melts when, with her brother Jim’s encouragement, Anna leaves her doll sitting by the fire (Griffin 2003). Anna’s carelessness is not Hale’s focus; this domestic tale centers on a boy. After tricking his sister, Jim is sorry and offers to buy a new head with his allowance—an unnecessary gesture, since the aunts have already provided one. Jim’s penance, he decides, is to write a book that will teach the doll “never . . . to run into danger” (St. Nicholas Nov. 1873: 29). Jim’s book, “About Dolls,” comprises the second half of Hale’s story. With an air of expertise, he describes the material dolls’ heads may be made from. He is quick to describe materials in relation to how they hold up to destructive forces, being “pounded,” “hammered,” “thrown,” or “heated” (p. 29). His expertise includes the knowledge that the face easily rubs off of a rubber head and that a china head can be smashed with a hammer, knowledge he has likely gained from experimentation. Jim’s effort appears endearing. His tone and his promise to write future volumes suggest sincere intentions. However, “About Dolls” is less a product of Jim’s repentance than an assertion of his control within the domestic sphere. Jim is able to master this feminized space by positioning himself as an authority on the care of a doll. Because he must remain true to masculinity, his book is not about how Anna can become a better surrogate mother; instead, he demonstrates his grasp of the technology of dolls’ heads (Griffin 2003). Jim’s effort to make amends for his boyish mischief thus places the doll squarely in the female dilemma of being protected by her aggressor. His first effort thwarted by the female community that watches over the doll’s well-being, Jim reinvents himself as an authority on female fragility, although he himself is the doll’s greatest threat. His project gives him the opportunity to demonstrate his knowledge of the doll’s vulnerability and the kinds of aggression that will lead to her downfall. His promise to write a sequel is precociously sexual: he will “tell more about trees and bees, and why dolls should take care of themselves” (St. Nicholas Nov. 1873: 29), very nearly a girls’ manual for preserving her virginity, if he had addressed the birds implicit in the trees. Jim’s mastery of domestic space thus involves encoding his own aggression as expertise about the need for girls to protect their virtue from the likes of him; in this way, he assumes agency in constructing patriarchal gender norms. Pure mischief—male mischief in particular—can make “bright, happy and wholesome” stories, Dodge writes in her review of Matt’s Follies by Mary N. Prescott (p. 174). “Though Matt is . . . up to mischief in every shape and form,” Dodge continues, “we like him immensely,” although she hopes he will change his ways. A story in the first volume of St. Nicholas, “Jim Crow”

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by Annabel Lee (presumably a pseudonym), offers an account of a cunning, curious, and playful pet crow who disrupts the home and farm of the author’s family with his thievery and aggression. Lee’s attitude toward Jim Crow is much like Dodge’s toward Matt: “he is very mischievous and provoking; but he has so many funny little tricks, and such pretty cunning ways, that we forgive all his bad deeds” (St. Nicholas Sept. 1874: 647). But Lee holds out no hope of Jim’s reform and draws no lesson from his mischief. The story seems intended purely as entertainment. The fun of the story depends upon a racist stereotype. The story reproduces in St. Nicholas a feature of Christmas giftbooks, lavishly made volumes that publishers offered beginning in the 1840s as a seasonal alternative to didactic children’s literature. Lee declares that her pet was named after “a colored man renowned in song,” a reference to the song “Jim Crow” by Thomas Dartmouth Rice, performed beginning in the 1830s—an early example of minstrel entertainment (Minstrel Songs). Christmas gift books included images of Jim Crow among their representations of the festivals of misrule that preceded the modern, bourgeois Christmas of family and consumerism (Gray 2004: 214). Rice’s “Jim Crow” is the stereotypical “comic Negro,” a fun-seeking, drinking man who steals and fights. He even murders a man and jokes about it afterward. The Jim Crow in St. Nicholas is black, infantile, thieving, and violent, qualities that mirror the stereotype perpetuated by Rice’s song. He steals and hoards food, but much of his thievery involves tools: a thimble, a pocket-knife, an oil-cap, the key to the smoke-house. He also screams at the horses, attacks a strange dog, fights with wild crows, and kills newly hatched chicks (Nardone 2003). Minstrel performers—white actors in blackface—embellished black stereotypes with ridiculously exaggerated actions. Although the earliest American advocates of Romantic pedagogy such as Eliza Follen and Bronson Alcott found Pestalozzi’s views deeply compatible with their abolitionism (Gray 2004: 194–5), for the postbellum bourgeois adaptation of Romantic constructions of childhood, the rowdy absurdity of minstrel stereotypes suited the project of making children’s literature playful and fun. At the same time, these stereotypes encode the “literary whiteness” of children’s literature, the assumption that literacy is a white domain. Black stereotypes distance white children from extremes of misbehavior while making them vicariously available as entertainment, at the cost of dehumanizing racial others. Like other pieces in St. Nicholas, “Jim Crow” foreshadows the later flourishing of plantation literature. As a thinly veiled stereotype, Lee’s pet crow substitutes for at least two of the black characters who would populate white children’s literature—the comic Negro and the exotic primitive (Broderick 1973). The author’s pseudonym invokes the plantation tradition’s nostalgia for the Old South as well as its association with childhood by referring to Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” an elegy for a misunderstood, innocent child-realm. Plantation literature would reinvent slavery as a model of social harmony, and parts of Jim’s history recapitulate the experience of slavery: his owners abduct him from his

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first home, put him to work in the fields, and thrash him for his worst misdeeds. Poe’s “The Raven,” too, resonates in Jim Crow, a comic and more versatile if unspeaking version of Poe’s somber bird. Like the raven, Jim is a mimic. His thefts of tools imply envious curiosity about human instrumentality. Lee gives special attention to his interest in tools that emancipation extended to blacks, money and literacy: he studies greenbacks and an inkwell (Figures 3.2 and 3.3). We last see Jim about to enter a window, the same entrance the raven used to torture Poe’s speaker. Jim’s inept aspirations to imitate human behavior are endlessly amusing to his owners because they are doomed to failure. He is not human, and nothing he does can threaten his owners’ status. Yet Lee’s story ends on a sinister note. Despite the mayhem the narrator has just described—Jim has been dumping work-baskets and swinging kittens by the tail—when he looks in her window “anxious to examine my ink-bottle,” she welcomes him, “Come in, Jim Crow” (St. Nicholas Sept. 1874: 649). What disaster of failed mimicry will come

Figure 3.2: From St. Nicholas: “Jim Crow”—“Examining the Pocket-Book.”

Figure 3.3: From St. Nicholas: “Jim Crow”—“Jim with Ink and Books.”

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from allowing Jim access to the tools of literacy? Lee wrote her story during Reconstruction as Congress was preparing equal rights measures (Nardone 2003). Later, as Reconstruction collapsed, the term “Jim Crow” would refer to state and local laws enacted in the South to reestablish segregation. But in Lee’s story, Jim is not subject to segregation. The “comic incongruity” of his efforts to act human depends upon his having full access to human domains. The joke in Lee’s story is on Reconstruction: the hint she drops teaches that the integration of blacks into spaces and practices that are coded human and white is absurd and potentially disastrous. The crow offers the reader an outlet for vicarious misbehavior while allowing him to feel superior; if as a child his agency is degraded, he is human and white, and will learn and grow. Racial construction thus serves the St. Nicholas agenda as a way of disciplining attributes of Romantic childhood. Dodge projected a magazine where children could “have their own way” (St. Nicholas Nov. 1873: 14)—but her agenda requires that their literary access to playfulness, adventure, and pleasure be filtered, displaced, and contained. St. Nicholas prepared children for the historic project of reconstructing genteel values for changing times by inculcating the values of an inaccessible past, transformed through the imaginary of nostalgia. However, the gendered, split sphere of middle-class life means that, although boys and girls are to fulfill binaristic adult gender roles, all of childhood must be subordinated, even feminized, if it is to be responsive to patriarchal social construction. For the St. Nicholas project, childhood is a resource for sweetening a threatened social construct. “Playfulness” stands in for passive reception; fun compensates children for their disempowerment. At the same time, reading these texts offers children roles as agents in constructing and organizing the social categories—class, gender, and race—that support the project. At the beginning of St. Nicholas’ thirty-two-year run, Bryant directs children to their agency by calling their attention to the spreading scent of a chopped tree. Seeking to grasp the cultural roles of children’s literature, we resist Bryant’s direction, dwelling on the instrumentalities that provoke the sweetness of the tree. Note 1

Joao Bayma, Joyce Fazio, Jenna Griffin, Alina Nardone, Danielle Sansevere, and Rachel Walegir, members of the graduate seminar we mention in our introduction, are our co-authors; they contributed substantially to the analysis in this chapter.

Chapter Four “One extra little girl”: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Orphans Roxanne Harde

In her 1880 short story, “Mary Elizabeth” (published first in St. Nicholas (Feb. 1880) and then collected in Fourteen to One, 1891), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps creates an enterprising orphan who functions as an agent of and catalyst for social change. “Mary Elizabeth” offers this description of its eponymous hero: “she was poor, she was sick, she was ragged, she was dirty, she was cold, she was hungry, she was frightened” (p. 316). The story also gives the child’s perspective: “‘God made so many people,’ thought Mary Elizabeth, ‘he must have made so many suppers. Seems as if there’d ought to been one for one extra little girl.’ But she thought this in a gentle way: very gently for a girl who had no shoes, no flannels, no hood, no home” (p. 317). In contrasting Mary Elizabeth’s extreme deprivation with her notions about God’s bounty and her entitlement to some of that plenty, Phelps juxtaposes the pathetic figure of the orphan with that of the enterprising child citizen. In introducing the idea of gentleness and its accompanying ideal of gentility, Phelps suggests that Mary Elizabeth’s mild outlook should be matched by honorable behavior from the well-born people she meets on the street. Instead, they give her advice about various social agencies, to which she responds by entering a famous hotel where she combines persistent begging with a startling act of charity that ensures the gentlemen present will help, at the very least, this one extra little girl. Phelps wrote many orphans into her fiction, and they consistently question the place of displaced children—orphans but also homeless, factory and immigrant children—in the social order. Karen Sánchez-Eppler rightly points out the conjoined but disparate views of such children in literature of the period “as spunky and resourceful” but also “as vulnerable and exploited” (2005: 821). Phelps writes both types of orphans, largely to the same purpose. Like many of Phelps’s orphans, Mary Elizabeth functions as both a site of innocent

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vulnerability and a force of resistance. She is the dependent child society is meant to save but she also enacts the possibility of self-invention. Her actions shame those who should be acting in a more appropriate fashion, her gentleness emphasizing their sham of gentility, and her perseverance and ingenuity in the face of adversity enacts American self-reliance. She teaches these gentlemen, and Phelps’s privileged young readers, about helping the helpless and alleviating suffering.1 Further, she is only one of the many children Phelps created who function in the public rather than the domestic sphere. This chapter focuses specifically on Phelps’s orphans, on what they tell us about the prevailing ideologies of their period, how they represent and sometimes codify them, and how they work against them in the spirit of reform, both as the active participants in social change and as the subjects of benevolence. The stories I consider were published in the leading American periodicals for children in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. I will first examine those middle-class children Phelps created who venture into the streets and slums to help orphans, children who were meant to mirror and inspire her middleclass readers. I then turn to Phelps’s enterprising orphans, children whose ingenuity, when combined with benevolent intervention, may lead to their survival. A reading of “Mary Elizabeth” concludes the chapter. These stories, I contend, add a subversive voice to contemporary and divergent discourses of the period, those many debates concerning the dependent child, even as they refute the mythical status of innocent childhood in Victorian America by making children, destitute or privileged, active and public agents of social reform. “I can’t tell you how it made a fellow feel”: Benevolence, Class, and the Orphan When Mary Elizabeth begs on Washington Street in Boston, she is told to go to a variety of agencies: “the Orphans’ Home. Some said: ‘Ask the police.’ . . . One lady told her to go to the St. Priscilla and Aquila Society, and Mary Elizabeth said: ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ politely. She had never heard of Aquila and Priscilla. She thought they must be policemen. Another lady bade her go to an Office and be Registered, and Mary Elizabeth said: ‘Ma’am?’” (St. Nicholas Feb. 1880: 317). With this list, Phelps demonstrates her awareness, if not endorsement, of Boston’s various benevolent agencies and societies formed to address the needs of dependent children. In so doing, she engages in the debate carried on between the proponents of the orphanage system and those who supported the “placing-out system” of foster care developed by Charles Loring Brace earlier in the century. As polemic as Phelps often is, she does not take sides in this controversy in an overt fashion. However, her orphans are most often sent to foster homes of one sort or another; very rarely does she suggest an institution as the appropriate facilitator of care for an orphan.2 Fairly regularly, Phelps ends the story with the death of the dependent child in scenes of high pathos that seem

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meant either to inspire her young readers to become proficient child savers or to shame them for not doing so. In “Us Boys, and the Other Boy” (Wide Awake Jan. 1880), Phelps combines foster care with a group of privileged children to save “the other boy.” “Us Boys” are a group of Back Bay boys, who “play on the Flats most every day after school,” the unnamed narrator tells his Cousin Moll, except the days when they are not occupied with French lessons, horseback riding, practicing their Latin, or visiting museums (pp. 11–12). Home and the domestic bores these boys in general, and the narrator associates being at home with his mother’s complaints about her neuralgia. Like Gypsy Breynton, the protagonist of Phelps’s popular series of children’s novels (1865: 865–1866), who equates domesticity with drudgery, these children prefer to be outside. In the streets, these boys indulge their friend Bob’s taste for an Italian organ grinder—described by the narrator as the wickedest person he had ever seen—who shows up one day with the “other Boy.” The man abuses the boy physically and verbally to make him dance and earn more money. As the narrator tells his cousin, “I like to see most anybody dance. . . . but now look here! When I saw that boy dancing, I can’t tell you how it made a fellow feel” (p. 12). However, when he describes the boy as pale, ragged, cold and hungry, he makes clear exactly how he felt when the child danced and begged for their coins. Pointing out that “he wasn’t like us,” the narrator also underscores the boy’s physical and ethnic difference (p. 12). While this difference continues to matter, the gang of boys begins to help the other boy even as they take note of the signs of continued abuse. Their affection for the younger child and gifts of food do little to alleviate his suffering, however. When he disappears, the narrator and Bob follow the organ man home to find the child very nearly “beaten to death” (p. 14). Their benevolent ingenuity is matched by their fathers’ as the men take charge of the boy’s case. Although Bob’s father first “said the Cruel Society for Preventing the Treatment of Children must be told,” he and the narrator’s father rescue the boy instead; they take him to the hospital and have the man arrested (p. 14). By having the narrator jumble the Society’s name, Phelps questions its efficacy; by having the boys and their fathers intervene, Phelps offers her readers and their parents an example they might follow. The other boy survives, his recovery, appropriately over the Christmas season, facilitated by a great many affectionate visits and gifts from the boys. When the other boy leaves the hospital, he is taken into foster care by a relation of Bob’s father, a Miss Mildred who lives on Beacon Street, “an old maid—very old—about thirty-five,” whom the boys like because she will talk about skating rather than school (p. 15). This fostering is, however, not parenting. The other boy functions as a servant in the house, wearing livery and answering the door. Describing him as fat and happy, the narrator emphasizes the boy’s physical and emotional well-being, and how pleased he is with his own benevolent actions. The discomfort he felt when the other boy was forced to dance and sing has been replaced by an appreciation for the willing singing, dancing, and serving, and he is ingenuous at best about

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the fact that the other boy’s place in his life, affection notwithstanding, will be as a servant. “Us Boys, and the Other Boy,” then, reflects social tensions about negotiating a reform that will alleviate suffering without changing the status quo. In a study of late nineteenth-century American children’s periodicals, R. Gordon Kelly notes that “the child reader was asked to become self-conscious about his own behavior and to see it in relation to a moral position dramatized in the stories” (1984: 37). Kelly argues that these publications provided a training ground for an American gentry class, and instilled “the code of the gentleman” in children who would have to address social threats to their class (p. 37). While being less than explicit about the connections between the two, Kelly suggests that those social threats often come from the groups and individuals who need aid from the readers of these periodicals, who need them to take a moral position and behave accordingly. For as radical as she may be about gender roles, Phelps rarely breaches class boundaries. Amy Schrager Lang notes in her study of class in The Silent Partner, Phelps “marks the place of an ideal middle class” (1994: 284). However, if Phelps tacitly leaves her characters, including her orphans, in the approximate class into which they were born, she seems to do so out of practicality rather than ideology. She adumbrates recent studies that trace the ways in which parents’ social class affects children’s life experiences. For example, sociologist Annette Lareau proves that in America, the land of opportunity and inequality, family practices and approaches to child rearing cohere and differ according to social class, and “lead to the transmission of differential advantages to children” (2003: 5). Unlike many of her peers who wrote for children and adults, Phelps never raises the dependent child into the wealthy classes, nor is she concerned with the trappings of affluence other than as a means to improve the conditions of others. She recognizes the reality of class disparity. In Phelps’s work, children like the Back Bay boys are advantaged as a matter of birth; their advantages make them responsible for those less fortunate, but do not go as far as changing class structures. However, by featuring the other boy, a thoroughly displaced child without name or clear origins, Phelps raises interesting questions about the place of the orphan, and all children.3 This child acts as a catalyst for the benevolent actions that pull boys who already shun the domestic arena further into strange neighborhoods. They are unharmed, of course, not made even slightly uncomfortable by their actions; all streets are benign for privileged children, the story seems to say. Following Sánchez-Eppler’s argument that just as childhood is the period of gender and race identity formation, it is where class identity is formed, and “in nineteenth-century America childhood itself is increasingly recognized as a sign of class status” (2000: 819), Phelps’s boys, exempted from labor outside their studies, are markers of their class. Still, they function outside Sánchez-Eppler’s paradigm in which “it is the working child who is seen to embody play, and hence teaches the middle class about fun,” and “the vision of the street-boy playing offers a salve to middle-class consciences” (pp. 820, 828).

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Christine Stansell concludes that reformers applied a middle-class understanding of child rearing to “the tenement classes,” and found those parents wanting for the simple reason that their children played and worked in the street, when in the middle- and upper-class worldview, children were kept properly inside. In Phelps’s world view, children of the middle class play in the streets; street children are there to work, and orphans are the truly displaced. For as frequently as she observes class boundaries, Phelps breaches those of gender. She matches her enterprising middle-class boys with a group of childsavers, girls who include one boy in their “mob,” in “Twelve Yards of Roses,” published in The Youth’s Companion in 1892. Led by a girl known only as Queen Mab, a title that emphasizes her social status and leadership qualities, these children befriend a bedridden orphan called Darl or Darling. Her illness is unnamed, but her constant pain is noted along with the general bleakness of her life.4 Darl is cared for by an ailing, elderly spinster aunt in a hovel described as “on the rear side of everything—the dark side, the lonely side” (p. 181). While casting around for some way to brighten Darl’s life, Queen Mab decides that her friends should each donate the enclosure, a yard-long wallpaper border of roses, that came with their recent issue of “The Paper.”5 Except for “the tolerable boy,” the children consider their gift a sizable sacrifice (p. 182). The last necessary yard comes from another ill child, one whose privilege does not protect her; she dies before Darl’s room is redecorated. The roses are such a success that a tearful Darl explains that her benefactors cannot understand what they mean unless they were “sick and in one very little room a good many years” (p. 183). Generally, the readers of the Companion would understand from this story that a small sacrifice might make a very large difference in the life of an impoverished orphan. On a more subtle level, they would see the middle-class child removed completely from her domestic sphere and placed in the streets and the slums. The mob of children led by Queen Mab never enter their own homes in the story; the mailman bringing the Paper hands it out on the street, so the children “could get a copy without waiting to go home for it,” after which they “settled on door-steps and curbs” to read it (p. 182). Their encounters with the domestic happen when they help clean and redecorate Darl’s room, in a home at some distance from theirs, physically and economically. Placed comfortably in the streets and outside their neighborhoods, like the boys in “Us Boys,” these enterprising children apply a combination of ingenuity and sacrifice to help an orphan. In so doing, they suggest the small but meaningful ways that children may act as agents of social reform. Brace reflects the growing middle-class social trend to keep children at school and play as long as possible; in “The Little Laborers of New York City,” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1873), he compares working and street children to those “of the fortunate classes . . . freed from the burdens and responsibilities of life” (p. 321). However, Phelps insists that middle-class children should feel those very burdens and responsibilities as she writes middle-class characters who play, go to school, and help the less fortunate. Her rather callous, if heuristic, use of the figure of the orphan in the

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stories of enterprising privileged children is mitigated by her many stories in which the orphan is the protagonist. “I’m Independent in My Way of Life”: The Enterprising Orphan While Phelps created many more orphans like the other boy and Darl, those passive subjects of middle-class benevolence, she also wrote a number of orphans who react to their situations with imagination and determination. One especially appealing example is Bobbit, of “Bobbit’s Hotel,” published in Our Young Folks in August 1870. This orphan is “not much higher than a yardstick . . . as dirty as the mud under his feet; with little restless, grimy hands; with a little restless, hungry mouth—bare feet (or nearly—he wore some holes with a little shoe to them), bare hands, bare knees sticking though his trousers, a hat without a rim—a boy without a bed—that was Bobbit” (p. 482). Set during a Boston blizzard, the narrative introduces Bobbit as highly resourceful, with the ability to react to situations and initiate advantages for himself. He earns money by holding gentlemen’s horses in the storm, and profits splendidly because experience has taught him how to improve his business, and he feels well off with fifteen cents, or “three days’ living in his pocket” (p. 483). While buying food, he sees two little Irish boys, “flattening their noses on the glass; they had ragged hats and holes in their shoes and they stood in a snow-drift” (p. 483). Orphaned himself, Bobbit offers an invitation to these younger and more helpless orphans: “‘I live in a hotel,’ said Bobbit, with an air. . . . ‘I take in folks . . . once in a while; free grettis. I’ll lodge you and board you till morning’” (p. 483). Leading them to his hotel, a rusted old locomotive boiler, Bobbit gives the boys his opinion of current social aid for orphans as he informs them how to avoid the police, who locked him up for fifteen days last winter for “roostin’ in a barrel” (p. 483). Bobbit’s dim view of benevolent institutions and the stopgap measures of police who incarcerate homeless children and adults who might otherwise die from exposure seems less a criticism of social responses to the poor and homeless than a confirmation of his own independent enterprise. He is like Johnny Nolan in Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick (1867), who escapes from foster care because “though his food is uncertain, and his bed may be any old wagon or barrel,” he is “so attached to his precarious but independent mode . . . that he feels discontented in any other” (p. 4). “I’m independent in my way of life,” Bobbit declares as they approach the dump and his boiler. Independence and enterprise are not enough, however (Our Young Folks Aug. 1870: 484). After sharing his food with the boys and tucking them into a pile of old clothes and blankets at the rear of the boiler, Bobbit sleeps near the barrel lid that is his door. He decides not to ask the boys for a jacket, because “if the front door should go down the jacket would not be any too much for his little lodgers” (p. 486). With this decision to sacrifice himself, the relatively cheerful narrative takes a grim turn. The storm becomes increasingly severe and morning finds the boiler snowed under and Bobbit frozen to death. Although the policeman

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and butcher who dig them out try to revive him, he is gone, and the boys are taken “to the Little Wanderer’s Home” (p. 487).6 As with the little girl who dies in “The Boys of Brimstone Court,” the message embodied in Bobbit’s death insists that working-class and street children must be rescued by the more privileged classes. Compared to the minor sacrifices of the middle-class children in the stories discussed above, Bobbit’s sacrifice for the other boys is extreme. The terseness of the ending, the high pathos involved in the recovery of his body, “the little hotel-keeper on his white pillow-case, asleep and cold,” and the unresolved future of the younger orphans must have been problematic for the readers of Our Young Folks (p. 487). This selfreliant orphan clearly follows Alger’s (1867) newsboys, Louisa May Alcott’s “Our Little Newsboy” (Merry’s Museum April 1868), and those created by Elizabeth Oakes Smith in The Newsboy (1854), but subscribing to the American ideal of independence works out much differently for Bobbit. Like the Brimstone Court boys, he simply does not have the resources to save anybody, including himself, and Phelps may be calling into question those earlier narratives in which street orphans take care of themselves into adulthood. Therefore, when Phelps created other enterprising orphans who fare better than Bobbit, like Darl and the other boy, they do so because of their ingenuity combined with intervention from those more fortunate. In “Our Little Woman” (serialized in Our Young Folks Nov. and Dec. 1872), Lois McQuentin and her dying mother must rely on the kindness of distant relatives, the well-off widowed Mrs. Colby and her daughters. While Phelps may indulge in the pathetic figure of the orphan in other stories, Lois refuses anything more than ordinary sympathy when her mother dies. She works as a shop girl while she finishes secondary school, and then enters medical school. In training to be a physician, Lois inspires Hannah Colby to support herself and her mother when their investments fail, a story told in “Hannah Colby’s Chance,” serialized in Our Young Folks in 1873. Lois quickly becomes independent because of her age, but she still needs charitable intervention to do so. In 1884, Phelps published a letter to girls, titled “Supporting Herself,” in St. Nicholas. Encouraging all girls to use their talents and intelligence to find a suitable career, Phelps sets out one general rule: “a girl should make herself mistress of some industry, or art, or profession, or trade, which has a market value in this great struggle for existence” (p. 517). Phelps’s belief that all women should have a career comes through clearly when Lois exclaims that if she had to live like Hannah, she “should choke” (Our Young Folks 1872: 732). If, in Phelps’s view, every girl should work, then Lois becomes synecdochical of every girl and Hannah of those privileged and idle girls, like the readers of periodicals for young people. While Hannah and her family initially resent helping the orphan, they eventually overcome their resistance to the inconvenience and expense of benevolence as they enable her to build a career. In “The Country Week of Job and Joggins” (The Youth’s Companion June 1894), Phelps draws upon two rather disparate areas of cultural currency: the

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figure of the self-reliant newsboy and those agencies created to deal with street children. As an entrepreneur, Bobbit invokes the figure of the newsboy, the independent little citizen on every urban street corner, even though he is not described as such. However, as shown above, Bobbit’s failure to survive subverts the popular literature about that figure. Job and Joggins are Phelps’s other answer to “the newsboy,” and they not only want to give up their independent life on the street, one actually steals a week long country holiday from the other. By not naming the specific agency, Phelps invokes John Gunckel’s Toledo Newsboys’ Association and Charles Loring Brace’s Children’s Aid Society, both of which sent street children to homes in the country for permanent or temporary foster care, where, as Brace notes, “they succeed remarkably well” (1872: 241). Clement points out that in its first three decades, the Children’s Aid Society, founded in 1853, placed out 60,000 youngsters (1997: 199). In the story of Job and Joggins, a lonely farm couple agree to give a city newsboy a holiday. Job arrives, “a very ragged boy . . . not clean,” and unlike Alger’s Ragged Dick, “He was not handsome” (p. 285). Uncomfortable about having a stranger in their home, the couple nonetheless do their best to welcome him; tellingly, both recognize his unease in the light of their own and decide “it mought be wuss to be him than to board him for a spell” (p.285). In so doing, they learn about this orphan’s life of deprivation and uncertainty. Their kindness inspires him to confess to stealing his “country week” from another newsboy named Joggins, a lame boy with a family who cannot or will not care for him. Job leaves and sends Joggins, “a very pale, little, homely, piteous lad,” in his place (p. 286). Unhappy with the situation, the couple brings back Job and ensures that Joggins’s neglectful parents have given permission for them to keep him. The ending states that the couple will keep both boys through haying season, and implies Job may stay with them permanently. In making a figurative orphan of Joggins, Phelps reflects a broadly held opinion. For example, Lydia Maria Child comments in her first set of letters from New York that the largest problem for the impoverished street children she saw was that they were not orphans (1843: 62), and Brace tended to view all street children as orphans. Stansell discusses the propensity of aid societies, especially Brace’s Children’s Aid Society, to separate children from their impoverished families, feeling they would be better off without parents who must be reduced to such circumstances by some vice or other: the “CAS viewed children as innocents to be rescued and parents as corruptors to be displaced,” and “where orphans were lacking, they manufactured them” (1987: 210). In a chapter on placing children in country homes, Brace at first mentions poor parents who willingly gave up their children to his agency, but quickly elides the presence of parents to consider all these children as orphans (1872: 234–45). Phelps’s criticism of impoverished parents who are inadequate to the task of raising their children certainly fits in with Brace’s tendencies. But her fictional manipulation of this trend is shaded. The couple refuse to discuss Joggins’s parents in front of him, and while they plan to extend his holiday out of pity, there seems no plan

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to make a figurative orphan out of him. Phelps may be respecting the rights of poor parents here, or she may simply be eliding the whole issue. Her narrative suggests the couple plans to keep Job, the “real” orphan, out of affection. Most importantly, Job’s initiative, dishonest though it may be, set in motion the mechanisms by which he would be rescued. Young readers of the Companion would likely notice that the farm couple have children and grandchildren willing to share them with an orphan. The story’s happy ending affirmed for the Companion’s readers that middle-class intervention in the lives of orphans was only for the good. Other of Phelps’s enterprising orphans are aided in different ways. In an 1879 story in The Youth’s Companion, “Popsy and Pease,” two very young orphans, attract a family to adopt them. While Phelps figures Joggins’s parents as some of the vicious poor, she depicts Popsy and Pease’s parents as simply unfortunate Christian citizens who fell on hard times and then died.7 Left alone, the children rely on fellow tenants to provide the little they have. Brace defined New York street children for the privileged young readers of St. Nicholas in 1882; “WolfReared Children,” he calls them, “born to hunger, and cruel treatment, and who live in miserable dens and holes . . . ignorant of love and hope” (1872: 543). If Phelps reflects this sentiment in some of her stories for children, then she shows some understanding about the various reasons for desperate poverty and dependent children in others. Before their parents died, Popsy and Pease had a loving, Christian, working-class home: their mother had explained to them that their father is “in heaven with the Lord Jesus” (Youth Companion Dec.1879: 45). To ease his little sister’s suffering, Popsy prints a letter to Jesus and delivers it to a mailbox, accompanied by his sister, during a blizzard. They are observed by the letter carrier who enlists a minister to wait with him at the mailbox the next day. When the children come for their reply, the minister and carrier get them medical attention, congregational donations for their future, and an adoptive family. Phelps depicts these children as appealingly pathetic: Popsy struggles to print his letter and its only concern is his sister; the toddler, called “Sweet Pease” by their mother, cries a good deal from cold and hunger but is charming nonetheless. They appeal immediately to the carrier, the minister and the congregation, as they would have to Phelps’s young readers. Their combination of charm, Pease’s lisping denials that she cries, and Popsy’s sacrifices on her behalf, alongside their bravery and his ingenuity in finding help, figure them as the most appealing type of orphan. Their removal from the ranks of the vicious poor, illustrated so well in Phelps’s description of their drunken, though charitable, neighbors, suggests that even the most displaced children can return to society. Popsy’s letter to Jesus, read in church, teaches the congregation, and Phelps’s audience, about redeeming the orphan.

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Conclusion: Learning a Lesson from the Orphan Mary Elizabeth also teaches the privileged; she is one of the gentler forms of “Homeless Girls” Brace describes in The Dangerous Classes of New York. Her roommate Jo, who Mary Elizabeth says “gets” her living, might be the more vicious sort of “Street Girl” Brace lingers over (1872: 300-02). Before describing the reaction of the privileged Bostonians on Washington Street to the begging orphan, the nameless narrator pauses over what her society understands about dealing with dependent children. “It is wrong to give to beggars, we all know,” she notes, because “we have been told so a great many times” (St. Nicholas Feb. 1880: 317). Although the narrator declares that had she been “as hungry as Mary Elizabeth,” she would also have begged, she questions whether or not she would have given the child anything; “how can I tell?” she asks (p. 317). Phelps thus infers that her society sees the poor, vicious or otherwise, as a social ill that should not be encouraged; giving to starving beggars, little girls or otherwise, would be an encouragement. However, when her nameless speaker, who sounds like an educated woman, admits she would beg if driven by desperation, Phelps insists her young readers and their parents also consider their actions in similar circumstances. With the narrator’s question about how she would have responded to Mary Elizabeth, Phelps suggests her audience consider their own reactions. The bedraggled child flopping about in her old rubbers soon causes Boston’s finest to reconsider their reactions to beggars. After Mary Elizabeth leaves Washington Street, “where everybody had homes and suppers without one extra one to spare for a little girl,” she goes to an old and famous hotel (p. 317). Managing to slip past staff and management, she enters the lounge full of gentlemen enjoying their after-dinner cigars and newspapers. The child begs from the patrons, “holding out one purple little hand,” but they refuse her (p. 317). When one man calls her in behind his paper to give her a nickel, he does so “in a hurry, as if he had done a sin” (p. 318). Conditioned by his culture to view this type of benevolence as a shameful act, this man is moved by her need nonetheless, and defies social mores. Nickel in hand, Mary Elizabeth continues to beg and spots a young man, his face “badly marked with the unmistakable marks of a wicked week’s debauch” (p. 318). Guessing that “if he weren’t so happy as the other gentlemen, he would be more sorry for cold and hungry girls,” she tells him she has not eaten for a whole day (p. 318). “I can’t help that. Go away,” he says, as he continues to nurse his hangover: “I haven’t had anything to eat for three days” (p. 318). When she responds to his need by weighing the situation, deciding his suffering is greater, and giving him her nickel, every man in the room reacts. They are, finally, ashamed by what they have done and left undone; as the young man declares, “she’s shamed me before you all, and she’s shamed me to myself! I‘ll learn a lesson from this beggar, so help me God!” (p. 318). In noting that “she’s preached me a better sermon . . . better than all the ministers I ever heard,” he aligns the child’s act of sacrifice with that the Christ (p. 319). By acting

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appropriately in the face of suffering, even when it requires great personal sacrifice, Mary Elizabeth reminds a roomful of wealthy and powerful men what charity means to the needy and to the benevolent. However, proper responses to starving orphans are only part of what she teaches. In the St. Nicholas version, the story is subtitled “Her True Temperance Story,” and when the men question Mary Elizabeth about how she came to be an orphan, they learn that her entire family—mother, father and older brother —has died of alcoholism and alcohol-related problems. The child’s refusal to judge the young man who has clearly been drunk for the three days he has not eaten seems more remarkable with this added information, as does her sacrifice for him. The young man’s shame stems as much from his debauched condition as his refusal to help a child, and if the other men in the lounge are ashamed by their lack of charity, their drinking habits might also come into play. Phelps rather neatly ties together and critiques social attitudes about charity and those about liquor. She wrote against drinking and the liquor industry throughout her career: Gypsy Breynton’s brother Tom compromises his future because of drinking, as do several other privileged young men in her fiction.8 As she notes in Chapters from a Life (1896), Phelps worked for temperance early on. When it was founded in 1879, she joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement and participated publicly to the extent her health would allow. She considered her writing her greatest contribution to the cause, however, and a vast number of her characters, major and minor and from all classes and many ethnic groups, suffer or cause great suffering because of alcohol. The displaced orphan Mary Elizabeth thus becomes tied to the gentlemen through abuse of liquor: her suffering and the young man’s come from the same cause. Social ideas about helping the vicious poor must be set aside in the light of these connections, and the men discuss how to help the child. The man who gave her a nickel proposes that his wife, who “knows all about every orphan in this city,” will know what to do about Mary Elizabeth. The story ends with the young man declaring he wishes there were “a thousand more like her in the world,” with which the narrator agrees, and then emphasizes that this is “Mary Elizabeth’s true Temperance Story” (St. Nicholas Feb. 1880: 319). Phelps thus leaves the orphan’s fate to her reader’s imagination, and while they likely placed Mary Elizabeth in the happy home of one of the gentlemen, the options Phelps chooses for her other orphan protagonists seem more plausible. Because her enterprise has brought her to the attention of people who plan to help her, she will survive, unlike Bobbit. She might be adopted into a working-class home, like Popsy, Pease, and Job, or taken into an upper-class home and trained for service, like the other boy in “Us Boys.” Given support into young adulthood, she may realize her potential and build a successful career, like Lois. Claudia Nelson looks at orphans and adoptions in the period, and concludes that as the child’s role in the workforce shrank, “orphans, more than most children, needed a new social function. Orphan fiction of the middle and late periods identifies that function as emotional” (2001: 56). Phelps’s orphans

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often serve an emotional function, but their social function has a far more heuristic intent as they insist her audience consider the place of the displaced orphan. Phelps writes into this literature for children the failures of their culture, and she makes them the commentators on those failures. These displaced orphans, a thousand like Mary Elizabeth, take determinative roles in their narratives and the social order even as their futures are most often decided for them. Notes 1

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6 7 8

Families with subscriptions to these periodicals would have had a fair amount of disposable income; Wide Awake cost $2.40 a year in the 1870s, or about $49.00 today. The Youth’s Companion was less expensive, costing $1.75 per annum in 1894. Phelps mirrors prevailing social views of charitable institutions; Anne Scott MacLeod points out that generally, Americans in the period held “the impression that they were not only the last but the worst refuge for the desperate,” because external help was to come from individuals enacting “the Christian obligation to practice charity” (1975: 59, 60). In his study of canonical American children’s novels, Jerry Griswold (1992) develops a methodology that uses the story of the orphan as an ur-narrative of suffering and triumph. In the light of his readings, the place of the orphan, after journeying and triumphing over challenges, is to find reconciliation between the phases of his life and with his new family or community. This type of orphan narrative animates novels as disparate as Little Women (1868) and The Prince and the Pauper (1881). In an earlier story, one that seems a clear forerunner to “Twelve Yards of Roses,” Phelps features another bedridden orphan and a group of boys who try to brighten her life. “The Boys of Brimstone Court,” however, are working-class children; they live near pawn-shops, grog shops, and “the small little gurrl’s beyont the whole” (Wide Awake July 1878: 10). While they brighten her life with day-old flowers, the boys do not have the resources to help her in any substantive way, and the story ends with her death. Given that The Youth’s Companion’s tag line was “An Illustrated Family Paper,” Phelps self-reflexively draws attention to the publication in which her story appears. The Companion was also known for its enclosures, but I have not been able to find evidence of a rose border. The Little Wanderers Home for Wayward Children was founded in Boston in 1849. For an extended discussion on nineteenth-century perceptions of the vicious and virtuous poor, see Stansell (1987) and MacLeod (1975, 1994). Notable among these are Donald Marcy (1893), a novel for children, and “His Father’s Heart” (Harper’s, Aug. 1910).

Part II Politicizing Children: “Normalization” and the Place of the Marginalized Child

Figure P II: From the nineteenth-century children’s periodical Chatterbox (1884–99). Reproduced from Carol Belanger Grafton, Children: A Pictorial Archive from Nineteenth-Century Sources (NY: Dover, 1978).

Chapter Five “A is an Abolitionist”: The Anti-Slavery Alphabet and the Politics of Literacy Martha L. Sledge

In the December 10, 1846, edition of the Pennsylvania Freeman a doublecolumn notice placed by the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS) announced articles for sale at their annual anti-slavery fair the following week: “Among the articles will be daguerreotype likenesses of Clarkson and Wilberforce; also beautiful lithophanies. Pot-plants, toys, pictures, and books; among the latter will be the LIBERTY BELL, for 1847, the well known Boston Annual; and an attractive book for children, THE ANTI-SLAVERY ALPHABET, published by the Committee of the Fair” (PFASS Dec. 2, 1847). Six weeks later, in reporting the results of the fair, they announced that “The Committee published an Anti-Slavery alphabet, written and presented to the Fair by Hannah and Mary Townsend, of this city. This little book was not only a source of much pecuniary profit, but we believe will sow Anti-Slavery seed in the heart of many a child, who, in future years, will plead that ‘his brother of a darker hue’ may have an ‘equal liberty’ with himself” (PFASS Jan 1847). But what exactly was the “anti-slavery seed” the alphabet book was sowing? Using an alphabet book to further their message about abolishing slavery was a clever strategy for the abolitionists, in beginning to convert the next generation of citizens and potential activists at a very early age and connecting it to reading. And yet, like other juvenile abolitionist literature, this small text reveals the politics at the intersection of abolitionism and children’s literature; it reveals the politicization of children and childhood through the lens of race and class and the use of children both to challenge the nineteenth-century politics of slavery and to perpetuate white, middle-class social hierarchies. Deborah De Rosa has placed The Anti-Slavery Alphabet in the context of “domestic abolitionism,” writings by women authors who were simultaneously “educat[ing] children—America’s future to political and moral consciousness”

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(2003: 10) and “mov[ing] women from all female spaces to public forums while providing them with a ‘safety net’ by claiming that they wrote for the children, an appropriate women’s audience” (p. 23). Shirley Samuels reads the alphabet in the context of the construction of identity in mid-nineteenth century “rival accounts of slavery” (1992: 157–8), connecting The Anti-Slavery Alphabet to the pedagogical concerns of Slave’s Friend, a juvenile abolitionist magazine. Neither study, however, places the text fully in the historical contexts of alphabets and literacy, but each stays in the realm of abolitionist politics. In this chapter I will argue that in addition to being part of the juvenile abolitionist literature tradition, and thereby challenging the institution of slavery, The Anti-Slavery Alphabet—one of only two extant anti-slavery alphabets and the only one published in the antebellum period and explicitly aimed at children1 —reinforces rather than challenges nineteenth-century racial politics. While abolitionists and anti-slavery activists were typically quite conservative on matters of race, and the rhetoric is in many ways typical of much nineteenthcentury white abolitionist discourse, the message has specific significance when aimed at children who are being empowered to read precisely in contrast to slaves who were frequently denied literacy, and when the abolitionist project espoused by an alphabet book whose overt purpose is to advance literacy fails to include extending literacy to the slave. Just as the alphabet is the foundation, the building blocks, for literacy for the overt audience of children, the racial politics and social hierarchies taught in the text form the foundation of cultural literacy. The alphabet book, in other words, empowers white children through literacy and initiates them into the cultural politics of education. Although we can’t know exactly how or even if the book affected its intended audience, we can examine the alphabet’s rhetoric for the message, intentional or unintentional, that it conveys and begin to understand the nature of its limitations and distortions. The Anti-Slavery Alphabet is in many ways a typical alphabet book of the nineteenth century. Printed 1.5 inches in height, in standard alphabetic order, each letter is followed by a quatrain that exemplifies it. Each page contains two letters with their quatrains, so that each double-page spread shows four letters and quatrains. However, the volume differs from many nineteenth-century alphabet books in its simplicity of design: the small 7-inch by 4-inch volume is printed on one side of the page only; each double-page printed spread is followed by a double-page blank spread. The front and back covers do have a floral design, which seems in contrast to the simplicity of the interior. Other alphabet books frequently have elaborate illustrations; the woodcuts in these other texts illustrate the concept of the quatrain that in turn exemplify the letters, making the illustrations about the actions rather than about the letters. Even in alphabet books with human figures posing as the letters, the emphasis is shifted from the audience recognizing and learning the letters to the physical relationship of the human body to the letters. In contrast, in The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, the emphasis is on the letters themselves: each page contains two block

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letters decorated only with a design of concentric circles and diamonds. The letters themselves are the most visually prominent feature of the page. Quite possibly the simplicity of design and printing derived from the Quaker origin of its authors, but this is not certain. What is clear is that the printer of the book, Merrihew & Thompson, produced other books for the PFASS with pages printed on both sides.2 Nor is there any obvious financial motive for a simple book, as the extant PFASS minutes do not include the cost of printing the text; however, in 1846, a year in which Merrihew & Thompson seem to have only billed the PFASS for their Annual Report, the society paid Merrihew & Thompson $15.00. In 1847, the society paid Merrihew & Thompson $32.12, suggesting that they might have spent around $17.00 to print the alphabet, but there are no figures indicating how many alphabets were printed. Neither do we know the retail price the PFASS charged for the small book. However, a comparison of receipts from different years of the fair may suggest some of the “pecuniary profit” the alphabet reaped. In the 1846 notice, the PFASS lists the alphabet as a book; the 1847 notice lists it among the toys for children (PFASS Dec. 2, 1847; PFASS Dec. 9, 1847). In whatever category they placed the receipts from the sale of the alphabet book, the difference between 1845 and 1846 is remarkable: the 1845 fair accounts show that toys brought in $22.77 and books $58.19, while a year later (the first year the alphabet was sold), toys brought in $73.15 and books $94.48 (PFASS Minutes).3 If the alphabet book is atypical in its simplicity, its function is quite typical for alphabet books of the nineteenth century. At its most basic level, any alphabet book disciplines the child in the alphabetic order; although early alphabet books sometimes included versions of the alphabet starting at different points (i.e. starting in the “middle” of the alphabet or working “backwards” from “Z”), by the mid-nineteenth century alphabet books primarily taught the alphabet only in one order (Crain 2000: 42)—“a, b, c.” The alphabet also organizes the analytical space of the child’s mind as it forms the foundation of literacy; the correctly trained child, that is, the new reader, has completely internalized the regulatory functions of the alphabet. The disciplinary function of the alphabet book and the resulting politicization is even more pervasive in the narratives that usually accompany the alphabet letters. The narratives carry particular importance for the nineteenth century because of the attitudes that “[c]hildren were seen as ‘passive vessels’ into which could be poured the moral values of a culture. Literature could be useful in this endeavor, and many held that reading was a means of ‘instruction-through-pleasure’” (Geist 1999: 29). If, therefore, as Mary Lystad puts it, “instruction in both social behavior and school subjects drove the children’s publishing industry” (Lystad 1980: 84, 85 quoted in De Rosa 2003: 117), there was no better place to begin this instruction than in a child’s first book—the alphabet book. Seen by many as “a principal task of childhood,” learning one’s “letters” was also “an essential element in the molding of each child’s character” (Sánchez-Eppler 2005: 3, 11). These “alphabet books of instruction” had their origins in The New England Primer

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(1771/1849), which includes religious documents such as The Lord’s Prayer and The Westminster Assembly’s Shorter Catechism in addition to uppercase, lower-case, italic, and block versions of the alphabets. This seventeenthcentury standard was still in print and widely used in the nineteenth century. Other “alphabet books of instruction” also made their appearance in the nineteenth century, ranging from the “The Alphabet of Flowers” to “‘The Picture Alphabet’—circa 1870, a book of religious psalms; ‘The Overland Alphabet’— 1853, recount[ing] a journey to India, and ‘The Picture Book of Birds’—1874” (McCulloch 1979: 80). Like The Anti-Slavery Alphabet these alphabet books explain or illustrate letters of the alphabet with rhymes. These “instructional alphabet books” are part of what Patricia Crain argues are a prominent “medium through which the child newly becomes acculturated” (2000: 56), and, consequently, “the child is similarly the medium through which the alphabet permeates the culture” (p. 56). Although how overt the social acculturation embedded in the alphabet books varies,4 The Anti-Slavery Alphabet clearly intends its social politics to be as important as—if not more important than —its literacy project, for instructing children in abolitionist politics, adult abolitionists believed, “might secure America’s sound future” (De Rosa 2003: 9). In its interest in moral instruction, therefore, the alphabet takes its place with other juvenile literature—and juvenile abolitionist literature. Some of the earliest juvenile abolitionist literature appeared in the 1830s; the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) published Slave’s Friend, a magazine for children from 1836–38. About the time it ceased publication, other forms of juvenile abolitionist literature began to appear. As expected, juvenile abolitionist literature reflected the philosophies of its creators; Slave’s Friend, for example, occasionally included stories whose purpose was to refute the assumption that immediate emancipation was “dangerous” (Thome 1838: 9–11), the position of the AASS. The PFASS was equally Garrisonian in its politics, believing that immediate abolition of slavery, by means of moral persuasion and economic boycotts, rather than working with political parties who supported the U.S. Constitution or emancipating slaves through purchase, was the correct mode: “the measures which through so many years, and in so many moral reforms, have proved efficacious, have still our confidence. The preaching of the truth by the voice, the pen, the press, the life, will, we trust, secure the triumph of our cause” (PFASS, Thirteenth Annual Report 1847: 7–8). Little is known of the authors of The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, Hannah and Mary Townsend. Although they are not identified in the alphabet book itself, the January 21, 1847, Pennsylvania Freeman article, identifies them as the authors; for unknown reasons, subsequent references have attributed the text only to Hannah Townsend. De Rosa identifies Hannah Townsend as a Quaker married to Daniel Longstreth and friends with Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Lucretia Mott, and Benjamin Lundy (De Rosa 2003: 22). A membership roll of the PFASS begun in 1845 includes only Mary Townsend as a member, although an article in Pennsylvania Freeman lists Hannah Townsend as a member of the Assistant

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Fair Committee in 1847 (PFASS minutes; PFASS Dec. 2, 1847). In short, little is known about the authors, other than they were members of the PFASS and therefore seemingly in concert with its Garrisonian beliefs. It is equally difficult to tell what children would have been receiving this instruction. Holly Keller argues that “most antislavery, and surely all abolitionist, texts for children were read outside the classroom” (1996: 92). Similarly, although the contents of Slave’s Friend only occasionally advocate immediate emancipation, Christopher Geist suggests that, nevertheless, its publishers were perceived as “dangerous radicals” and therefore probably only abolitionist families would have subscribed to the juvenile magazine (1999: 33–4). The alphabet, too, might have been limited to abolitionist homes; however, the PFASS reported that attendance at the 1846 fair where The Anti-Slavery Alphabet was sold was not confined to the abolitionist community. Our recent annual Fair [December 17–19, 1846] has been attended with unexampled prosperity, its receipts far exceeding those of any former year, and the moral effect on the community has evidently been deeper and wider than has ever before been produced by the same cause. Among the crowds which thronged the Saloons of the Assembly Buildings on that occasion, were many persons who never before mingled in any gathering of abolitionists, or listened to an exposition of our doctrines and measures. (PFASS, Thirteenth Annual Report 1847: 10) If their assessment is accurate, the alphabet may, therefore, have found readers outside the abolitionist community. Whoever the actual audience was, The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, like other juvenile abolitionist literature, overtly challenges the nineteenth-century politics of slavery and invites children to challenge them as well through recurring conventions from abolitionist literature. The abolitionist narrative of the alphabet begins, predictably, with A is an Abolitionist— A man who wants to free The Wretched slave—and give to all An equal liberty. The Anti-Slavery Alphabet quatrains continue through the alphabet by engaging the conventional abolitionist device of recounting the horrors of slavery and the abuses of slaveholders. The text alphabetizes the slave economy of the Cottonfield, the Rice-swamp, Sugar, and Tobacco, and the instruments of torture such as the Driver and Whipping post, the Kidnapper and the Lash, the Hound and the wake-up Gong, as well as the slaves’ Quarters, the slave-trading Vessels, and northern Merchants.

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Although the alphabet does not narrate a single sustained plot line, it includes several “mini-plots,” frequently uniting a double-page spread of four letters in a storyline. The first four letters “A–D” establish the scene with stock abolitionist figures: Abolitionist, Brother, Cotton-field, and Driver. “E–H” are connected by images of the Fugitive fleeing (in this time before the Fugitive Slave Act), in contrast to the “Eagle, soaring high; / An emblem of the free.” The Eagle, of course, evokes the American icon, and would seem to be a fitting model for slaves escaping their bonds, but here the Eagle is not a model for the slave to emulate but a model to which the abolitionist should aspire. “But while we chain our brother man, / Our type he cannot be.” In other words, this Garrisonian abolitionist text claims, the United States cannot fittingly claim the Eagle as a symbol until slaves are free. Much abolitionist literature links slavery to the dissolution of the family, drawing on middle-class anxiety about the waning importance of the family in society. The two quatrains in the middle of the alphabet, “I–L” and “M–P,” tell two versions of this story. In the first, the Infant is torn “shrieking” from “its” mother after each is sold at a public auction. This narrative seems to mix several plot-lines, in describing a “public auction,” a Jail cell where a “cruel master” arrives, and “a Kidnapper, who stole / That little child and mother,” but all of them center on how slavery and its agents destroy the mother–child relationship. This series of four letters is the only part of the text which genders a slave as a female and even here the text ignores the sexual abuse through which the infant may in fact have been conceived. Furthermore, the alphabet does not gender the infant but refers to the infant as “it,” in a rhetorical move that simultaneously de-genders and de-personalizes the infant and the slave. In the second story, a Parent is “weeping all alone” after “The child he loved to lean upon, / His only son” is taken. Placed by the text in a “far distant home,” the father is left without help for his seemingly old-age; although the perpetrators are less vilified than in the narrative of the mother and infant, here the alphabet indicts “white men” in this act of breaking up a family. The direct indictment in the text extends to northern Merchants and consumers: M is the Merchant of the north, Who buys what slaves produce— So they are stolen, whipped and worked For his, and for our use. Lest a northern audience wish to indict only southern slave-holders, in other words, the alphabet positions northerners—and the child-audience— as equally culpable, right in the middle of these two narratives of the break-up of families. The racial association of the reader with the agents of slavery produces a distance from the “darker” slave, a distance that increases with the invocation of a pre-slavery past that is utopian in its vision of harmony with nature—

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N is the Negro, rambling free In his far distant home, Delighting ‘neath the palm trees’ shade And cocoa-nut to roam. O is the Orange tree, that bloomed Beside his cabin door Similarly, an “other-world” exists in post-slavery “Upper Canada / Where the poor slave has found / Rest after all his wanderings, / For it is British ground!” The reference to British Canada points to an irony often cited by abolitionists: blacks could find freedom in a monarchy while being enslaved in a democracy. Furthermore, the pre- and post-slavery scenes of freedom and bounty are in sharp contrast to the scenes of grueling depravity and life-taking work in slavery and the resulting dehumanization of “wretched” slaves who shriek, lie on the floor, and tremble before their masters. The alphabet attempts to bridge the distance between abolitionist and slave by placing the white reader in a position of identification with the slave. “A” suggests that the abolitionist holds a position of power in relationship to the “wretched slave,” but “B” suggests an identification of the reader with the other. B is a Brother with a skin Of somewhat darker hue, But in our Heavenly Father’s sight He is as dear as you. Here, the text constructs identification through stating a kinship—he is a brother—and through comparison to an indeterminate “you.” Initially the pronoun shift from “our” to “you” seems merely to ensure the rhyme scheme, but the rhyme scheme itself brings together “you” and the “darker” brother rhetorically. Furthermore, using “you” also forces the reader to identify closely with the brother; the reader does not have to identify with an “our” or “us”— the collective can exist solely within the text—but “you” forces an identification. The use of “you” was, of course, a fairly typical rhetorical device of abolitionist writings and speeches. However, the use of “you” here also explicitly constructs children through the politics of race and gender. Shirley Samuels points out the tension in pro- and anti-slavery texts between locating identity in the body and escaping biological essentialism (1992: 160); The Anti-Slavery Alphabet is no exception. Rather than merely focusing on the “wretched” condition of slavery, the “B” quatrain racializes the slave’s body—and the reader’s: this quatrain, in fact, erases the condition of slavery; the “heavenly Father” does not see—and find equally endearing—an enslaved person and a free person, but racialized beings, at once invoking both a biological and a spiritual basis for identity. In this alphabetic quatrain he may be a “brother” to the reader (and thereby

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gendered male), but his worth is in spite of his “somewhat darker” skin tone, not in spite of his condition as a slave. By equating “a skin of / Somewhat darker hue” with slavery, the text racializes slavery and simultaneously constructs the whiteness of “you” the reader. In doing so, the text participates in “the ideology of white supremacy [that] . . . impacted even the supposedly abolitionist juvenile works” (De Rosa 2003: 2); furthermore, the text both inscribes the “logic of racial difference” that Caroline Levander has described, a process in which the child was a “tool” of “instantiating race as an integral, enduring, and complicating element of U.S. national identity” (2004: 224) and invokes the Romantic ideal of childhood that Janet Gray has described, in which “white childhood” and “other-raced ‘primitives’“ combine in constructing childhood as “rustic, naïve, [and] spiritually heightened” (2004: 227). In other words, the alphabet text codifies rather than challenges white social hierarchies for the next generation of readers and citizens. The use of “you” to identify the reader with the slave ultimately fails, for each time “you” appears, “you” is equally differentiated from the slave. In the two subsequent quatrains that invoke “you,” the racializing is implicit rather than explicit, perhaps because the racializing has been so direct in “B” that its effect reverberates through the rest of the text. However, in reiterating the impetus behind the economic boycott of abolitionists, the appeal to “you” that appears in the “S” quatrain politicizes the child in terms of class: S is the Sugar, that the slave Is toiling hard to make, To put into your pie and tea, Your candy, and your cake. Not only is the “you” participating in the economy of slavery by buying the product of slave labor, but the product itself is needed only for luxuries—pie, tea, candy, cake. The “you” is indulging in extravagance—and in a class position to do so. The class identification further marks the racial whiteness of childhood; as Gray suggests, the consumption necessary for capitalism is “cultivated within the space of childhood” (p. 190) and identifies children with the “leisured class” (p. 206). Furthermore, childhood itself is a feature of a nonworking class, since in their leisure these middle-class children are removed from the necessity of producing goods. These children are simultaneously racialized and classed both by their removal from the production of and by their consumption of goods. The final appearance of “you”—in the “Z” quatrain—shifts the comparison of the “you” from a slave to an abolitionist: Z is the Zealous man, sincere Faithful, and just, and true; An earnest pleader for the slave – Will you not be so too?

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In this call—whose content as well as position at the end of the text mirrors the ending to a revivalist church service—the text shifts the reader’s attention away from the conflicted duality of identifying with, yet maintaining a separation from the slave, and toward the reader’s proper role in society as an abolitionist. Paired with “Y is for Youth” on the last page of the alphabet, this final quatrain moves the reader into adulthood and from inaction to action. Of course, as with all abolitionist literature, the text wants to effect change—either political or more commonly personal behavior that in turn leads to political change—and one would not expect readers to be propelled out of the text into slavery, but the shift in the object of identification reveals the position of the audience of the alphabet within white society. While identification with a “darker” brother may be the starting point, the child should not stay at that level, but is encouraged to become an adult, signified by becoming part of the white, middle-class abolitionist community through the participation in abolitionist political activities. Even the syntactic formula used in the alphabet has begun to indoctrinate the child to act. The majority of the alphabet uses what Patricia Crain identifies as “prosopopoeia” or “personification” in constructing the letters (2000: 68): “D is the Driver.” In making the letters “subjects of predicates, agents of action” (p. 65), the alphabet re-creates the world in which slavery flourishes, giving it people, animals, institutions, nature; as syntactical noun-subjects, the letters themselves act. The negative actions of most of the letters as they act in the world of slavery are framed by the implied positive actions of the Abolitionist and the Zealous man. However, the alphabetic quatrains imply rather than state the positive action the child-audience should take. The most direct admonition is that, unlike Xerxes who “fought with swords; let truth and love / Our only weapons be.” The reference to Xerxes calls to mind the New England Primer use of Xerxes. Unlike the Primer versions in which “Xerxes the great” variously “did die” (New England Primer 1849) and “shar’d common fate” of death (Beauties n.d.), the Anti-Slavery version calls for common ground with a Xerxes who is alive and fighting for truth. This quatrain breaks the formula that dominates the alphabet, changing it from the letter itself acting to the letter merely standing in for the model: “X is for Xerxes.” “Y” also follows this metaphorical construction: “Y is for Youth.” In each of these quatrains, the dominant formulation of the alphabet would have sufficed: “X is Xerxes” or “Y is a Youth.” While one might argue that The Anti-Slavery Alphabet is merely using two different alphabetic conventions, I find it significant that in the most direct call to action within the alphabet, the rhetorical construction backs away from action. The quatrains do suggest that consuming Rice, Sugar, and Tobacco contribute to slavery, but the introductory poem “To Our Little Readers” gives the most direct instruction on what can be done: refuse items made of sugar—“Candy, sweetmeat, pie or cake”—with the admonition that “The slave shall not work for me” (p.18). Most importantly, the alphabet instructs the child to teach. Placing the child in a position of teacher can be seen in a couple of ways. Children were used in

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nineteenth-century discourse as agents of reform; in fact, as Sánchez-Eppler suggests, their ability to “reform the nation” was predicated on their childishness (2005: xxii). While insisting on a child’s innocence does in fact reinforce the child’s “dependent state,” it also contests the proper place of the child in white society by overturning the hierarchy that places the adult above the child, particularly since in The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, the child does not remain outside the political realm. The literacy project of the alphabet book is, of course, written as if from an adult reader to a nonreading child. And, so is the twenty-two-line introductory poem, entitled “To Our Little Readers,” which explicitly aims to enlist “little children” in the abolitionist cause. However, as the “Z” quatrain implies in its call to “you” to be “an earnest pleader for the slave,” the ultimate goal of the alphabet book is to turn these “little children” into teachers of a broader, albeit white, population. Furthermore, a child acting on the abolitionist principles, the poem suggests, will realize a role reversal between adult–teacher and child–student, for in addition to educating their “playmates” to “the slave child’s fate” (p. 13), the child–student must educate adults. Since men “may harken what you say, / Though from us they turn away” (pp. 9–10), the children are to “plead with men / That they buy not slave again” (pp. 5–6) and that they set free those they have bought. Thus, children “May some useful lesson teach” (p. 19). In reconstructing the role of the child–student as a teacher, the text reverses the social hierarchies of adult/child just as it sought to reverse the political hierarchies of slavery, or, as Holly Keller puts it, encouraging children to speak out against slavery “was a clear challenge to the moral authority of adults” (1996: 87). The dual projects of the alphabet book—acculturation through literacy and abolitionism—seem, therefore, to conflict with each other in their subject positioning of the child-audience as student and as teacher. And yet, within the racial politics of literacy, the subject position of the childaudience is the same: the child-audience is a student only in relationship to white adults (the teachers of the alphabet); more importantly, the child-audience is a teacher also only in relationship to white adults. While the text obviously does not speak to an enslaved audience—who, of course, needed no education in the evils of slavery—the alphabet book fails to suggest extending literacy to slaves in its program for helping slaves while simultaneously recognizing the importance of and promoting literacy in the free white child-audience. If the white child becomes an adult through literacy, the slave remains in a child-like preliterate state. In positioning the child-audience thusly in the politics of literacy, the alphabet fails to unite fully the projects of abolitionism and literacy. Although quick to point out the ironies in the differences between a monarchy and a democracy, and between an eagle and a slave, the alphabet seems blind to its own irony of advocating literacy to only one group. Comparing the education of an enslaved child to the education of the alphabet’s child-audience illuminates further the politics of literacy in The AntiSlavery Alphabet. Slave narratives frequently begin with the child “learning” he or she is a slave, stated most explicitly in the well-known first sentence of

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Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: “I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away” (1973: 3). Frederick Douglass’s account is less explicit, and yet he too marks his passage “into” slavery: I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I will remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember any thing. It was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. (2001: 16) Although he does not overtly state that he did not realize he was a slave before this incident, he clearly divides a state of “innocence” from one of experience as he passes through the “gate” of slavery. In addition to ushering in physical changes for both Jacobs and Douglass, the lesson that they are slaves marks their psychological entrance into the racial logic and politics of slavery. Jacobs states that she is six years old at the time of her “lesson,” and Douglass gives enough biographical detail to suggest that he too was around this same age when he witnessed his Aunt Hester being beaten. Because this initial education in the politics of slavery typically occurs (as it did for both Jacobs and Douglass) at about the same age that children were thought capable of learning to read, and because slave children, of course, were not usually given the opportunity to learn to read, the “entrance” into slavery equally marks the slave child’s exclusion from literacy. For the child-audience of The Anti-Slavery Alphabet there is also a correlation between literacy and slavery. But while the enslaved child is denied freedom as well as literacy, the child-audience of The Anti-Slavery Alphabet is granted both freedom and literacy. Put in disciplinary terms, the enslaved child’s discipline remains external and realized with a lash, while the discipline of the free child-audience is interior and achieved through education. The alphabet’s failure to acknowledge its participation in the contrast between disciplinary methods for enslaved and free white children suggests a perverse alignment of the alphabet with state laws prohibiting literacy among enslaved people. These laws were varied; for example, laws in North and South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia did prohibit slaves from learning to read, as did those of Alabama and Louisiana in the 1840s; despite the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion, Virginia slaveholders, however, seemed to demand autonomy by allowing owners to teach their own slaves if they chose (Cornelius 1983: 173, fn 7). And yet, Cornelius acknowledges, social custom was harsher: “ostracism” and sometimes brutal punishment did occur when a slave was discovered by whites to be literate, and slaves themselves frequently believed they were also legally prohibited from learning to read. The politics of literacy in The Anti-Slavery Alphabet sharply contrasts that found in slave narratives and other abolitionist novels, as well as early novels by

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African Americans that correlate literacy with physical as well as psychological freedom. In The Bondwoman’s Narrative, Hannah Craft’s narrator states that: “My master never permitted his slaves to be taught. Education in his view tended to enlarge and expand their ideas; made them less subservient to their superiors, and besides that its blessings were destined to be conferred exclusively on the higher and nobler race” (2002: 6). Frederick Douglass’s master Hugh Auld makes similar statements when he learns that his wife is teaching Douglass “the A, B, C”: “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. . . . Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now . . . if you teach that nigger . . . how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave” (2001: 31). Douglass recognizes the truth of Auld’s comments and determines to use its corollary logic: if illiteracy equals slavery, then literacy equals freedom, and so “[f]rom that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom” (p. 32). In these texts by African-American authors, the slaves pursue literacy despite opposition by their masters and, in Douglass’s case through trickery of his child-teachers, and so effect their own literacy. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, however, Harriet Beecher Stowe unites the politics of literacy and abolition in children. In the first direct look at Uncle Tom, young George Shelby is teaching him to write, and later Eva will help both Uncle Tom and Mammy to read and write. The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, however, does not yet envision equating the “‘good’ child” with educating slaves (De Rosa 2003: 128). The alphabet’s failure to unite fully the literacy and abolitionist projects is particularly striking considering an obvious awareness by the authors, as members of the PFASS, of the racial politics of literacy. As both Julie Winch and Dorothy Porter have noted, African Americans in Philadelphia, particularly the women, organized literary societies in the early 1800s to increase literacy and thereby “elevating” themselves and “the entire race” by teaching the next generation (Winch 1994: 109). The African-American women who dominated the literary societies were also frequently involved in the PFASS (p. 115), and the PFASS had begun a school for African-American students in 1834 and continued supporting it financially until 1849, despite periodic strained relations with Sarah Douglass, the African-American director of the school (Soderlund 1994: 76–7). Despite the codified relationship between slavery and illiteracy, despite the connections between freedom and literacy made in other abolitionist texts, despite the abolitionist acculturation through literacy that The Anti-Slavery Alphabet asserts as one of its projects, the narrative does not suggest literacy— its “other” project—for enslaved people. The white, middle-class child-audience is invited into the alphabetic world, the world of literacy, while the black slave who is the impetus for the text is kept outside. Who is included and who is excluded is ultimately related to the economics of slavery and to the commodification of the slave’s body as the impetus for the alphabet itself. The alphabet has consistently portrayed slavery as an economic rather than a moral or religious problem. Even in the quatrains on the dissolution of the slave

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family, the emphasis is on the economic impact rather than on the immorality of the situation. Thus, the economics of slavery and abolitionism are central to the argument of the text. Although the Garrisonian abolitionists of the PFASS condemned buying slaves to set them free, buying goods such as the alphabet would, they believed, lead to the slave being freed. The proceeds of the book would be used to further anti-slavery goals—“to sustain the agents at present in the field, and to publish tracts, &c. for the wider dissemination of our principles” (PFASS Thirteenth Annual Report 1847: 9)—but the money is being raised by capitalizing on the very slave’s body the abolitionists wish to free, by commodifying the body they claim should not be a commodity. In some ways, this type of commodification was part of all abolitionist literature, including slave narratives. What this suggests is the intricate interconnection of slavery with capitalism, a relationship most fully explored by Thomas Haskell in which he relates the rise of capitalism and the rise of humanitarian sensibility, including abolitionism. Does the economic relationship of the text to slavery compromise the alphabet’s critique of slavery? Ultimately I do not believe it does; however, what I am suggesting is that in The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, literacy is a tool with which to challenge the system of slavery and yet the racial politics of literacy are neither acknowledged nor challenged. The Anti-Slavery Alphabet continues to be circumscribed by the culture and economics of slavery, a stance reinforced by physical aspects of the text: the text of each page is completely enclosed in a black border. Nothing—letter, quatrain, page number, the child, the slave— escapes the boundaries of the page or the limitations of the ideology it codifies. Notes 1

Abel C. Thomas wrote The Gospel of Slavery: A Primer of Freedom that was published in 1864. The book does not focus on the letter of the alphabet; the page for each letter includes a relief print illustration, a ten-line poem, and a prose commentary. The poem and the prose commentary are clearly aimed at an older audience than young children for whom easily rhymed quatrains would assist in learning the building blocks of literacy. As far as I can tell, there are no corresponding alphabets acculturating children to accept a slave society. “A Confederate Alphabet” is included in the Confederate Imprints series; however, it is very different from the The AntiSlavery Alphabet: “A Confederate Alphabet” (1861) is a one-page alphabetical poem lambasting Union army officers that seems directed more toward adults than children (“A is for Anderson, foremost and least, / B is for Bethel or Butler the Beast….”). The only other alphabet in the Confederate Imprints series is the Illustrated Alphabet (1863) that has no mention, verbal or visual, of the Southern slave economy; although illustrated with agricultural scenes, the scenes do not include any cotton, sugar cane, or slaves, but rather thatched roofs and grain. Many of the prefaces or testimonials to primers printed in the Confederate states from

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1861–65 reference the need for a “confederate primer”; a testimonial in the Confederate Spelling Book says that “It has also the special merit of being adapted to our Southern latitude, and in accordance with the views and sentiments of the people of the Confederate States.” However, the only mention of the “Confederate States” in the 190 pages is a song entitled “National Prayer for the Southern Confederacy” (1864: 144), and most of the primers do not include even one mention of the current political climate. As a result, the impetus for printing the primers in the Confederate states seems less to acculturate children to a particular lifestyle than to provide school books without depending on the Union. In 1846, Merrihew & Thompson was located at 7 Carter Place in Philadelphia. Stephen E. Merrihew was the principal partner in a printing business that spanned from 1839 to at least 1874. Unlike most commercial publishers, who according to John R. Adams “frankly boycotted” abolitionist literature (Adams 1989: 33 quoted in De Rosa 2003: 24), Merrihew and his various partners printed many books for the Philadelphia and American Anti-Slavery societies, including the “Declaration of the [American] AntiSlavery Convention” at their founding meeting, December 1833. Permission to quote from the PFASS archives granted by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. See both Patricia Crain (2000) and Karen Sánchez-Eppler (2005) for discussions of social acculturation in a variety of alphabet books.

Chapter Six Overcoming Racism in Jacob Abbott’s Stories of Rainbow and Lucky and in Antebellum America Jeannette Barnes Lessels and Eric Sterling

Jacob Abbott (1803–79), arguably the most prolific author of nineteenthcentury American children’s literature and of American children’s literature in series form, wrote and published over two hundred books. His books for children and young adults were widely read, including the “Makers of History” series that the author co-wrote with his brother John. In a conversation with John Abbott, Lincoln said, “I want to thank you and your brother [Jacob] for Abbotts’ series of Histories. I have not education enough to appreciate the profound works of voluminous historians, and if I had, I have no time to read them. But your series of Histories gives me, in brief compass, just that knowledge of past men and events which I need. I have read them with the greatest interest. To them I am indebted for about all the historical knowledge I have” (John Abbott 1869: v). Alan Gribben, who has studied Mark Twain’s reading and library, observes that all twenty-four of Abbott’s books from the Rollo series were present in the celebrated author’s library and were read by Twain and his daughter Livy to his daughter Susy (1980, vol. I: 4). Gribben lists forty books by Jacob Abbott in Mark Twain’s library (vol. I: 3–4). Although most of Jacob Abbott’s books were quite popular in his lifetime, the five involving a black hero, Rainbow, were considerably less popular and were absent from Twain’s library. Many university libraries house copies of Abbott’s Rollo books and volumes from his “Makers of History” series, yet only three university libraries in the United States contain the Stories of Rainbow and Lucky series: Handie (1859), Rainbow’s Journey (1859), Selling Lucky (1860), The Three Pines (1860), and Up the River (1861). Some of the books from the Rollo series are currently in print—more than 170 years after their publication—

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while the Rainbow books went out of print 140 years ago after only two printings. Although these facts in no way reflect upon the quality of the volumes in the Rainbow and Lucky series, one must wonder if the inclusion of a black protagonist, during an era in which an overwhelming majority of book buyers were white and racial prejudice against blacks was prevalent, resulted in the books’ lack of popularity. In tone, intention, style, and the race of the protagonist, The Stories of Rainbow and Lucky differ markedly from more traditional didactic children’s literature of that era. Most audiences were not accustomed to reading books featuring a black hero. As Gail Schmunk Murray correctly notes, “American child fiction most commonly featured an Anglo, genteel, domestic scene designed consciously to socialize American children into particular middle-class mores” (1998: 117). And when writers of nineteenthcentury American children’s literature did include black characters, “[t]hey portrayed African-Americans only in subservient roles, in which their docility, simple-mindedness, and penchant for having a good time bolstered their creator’s own confidence in the racial hierarchies they embraced” (p. 125). It is quite conceivable, then, that racial prejudice accounts for the lack of popularity of Abbott’s Rainbow and Lucky books during the author’s lifetime and the consequent scarcity and obscurity of these particular children’s titles today. Abbott was a celebrated and enormously popular author of children’s books because he respected children and did not write about them or for them in a condescending manner. Abbott’s Rainbow books, like his other books for children, follow the Horatian model of instructing and entertaining. Abbott’s five-volume series concerns Rainbow, a highly intelligent and exceedingly honest and altruistic fourteen-year-old free black male who lives near Southerton, about seventy-five miles outside of Boston, immediately before the onset of the Civil War. His good friend Handie Level is a nineteen-year-old white carpenter who has recently inherited a farm called The Three Pines. Rainbow also befriends the curmudgeonly white stagecoach driver and mailman, Trigget. Lucky is a horse—owned by Mrs. Blooman (Handie’s neighbor)—who shares a special bond with Rainbow. The books in the series tell the adventures of Rainbow as he encounters racial prejudice, rescues Lucky, helps capture a thief and a counterfeiter, aids an injured boy, recovers a woman’s pocketbook, gathers pond lilies for a young girl, attempts to sell Lucky in Boston for Mrs. Blooman, and benevolently comes to the aid of numerous people in distress. The Rainbow books teach children valuable lessons, such as financial thriftiness, the proper use of tools, the importance of honesty and integrity—and perhaps most significantly, the wrongfulness of racial prejudice. Although Lyman Abbott believes that Jacob Abbott, his father, was not a political man because the latter chose not to write essays and pamphlets on governmental issues and seemed to do nothing of that nature aside from voting (1922: 359), Jacob was in fact a political writer in that his children’s books subtly disseminate his views and moral advice on sociopolitical issues such as race and prejudice. In this regard, he differed markedly from other contemporary

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American children’s literature authors, who were not inclined to include virtuous and capable black protagonists. In some circles, Abbott’s Rainbow books were considered revolutionary and a threat to the status quo. Abbott might have lacked confidence that he could write books that would ameliorate white adults’ attitudes toward blacks because these readers were rigidly set in their ways after harboring their prejudiced attitudes for decades. The author wanted to convey his sociopolitical ideas in his books to those with an open mind, those whose values and beliefs were malleable—children. Mary E. Quinlivan states that “Abbott has a secure reputation as one of the most important and prolific writers of the moral tales so typical of the children’s literature of antebellum America” (1982: 27 our italics). Abbott’s Rainbow books manifest didactically the morality of kindness toward blacks and the immorality of racial injustice. In writing his Rainbow stories about a black hero, Abbott was “lending a voice to a silenced group” (Nikolajeva 2005: 15). Abbott, unlike most authors of his era, portrayed the pain that blacks experienced when they were victims of racism, illuminating for his white readership the great suffering that they inflicted upon blacks because of prejudice. This chapter will demonstrate Jacob Abbott’s attitude concerning racism and the author’s use of children’s literature to effect social change through his exemplary black protagonist, Rainbow. Abbott dispels the popular misconception that a vast majority of racial prejudice occurred in the South while the blacks in the North lived harmoniously in a region inhabited primarily by Abolitionists. The assumption is incorrect that the New England of 1860 was a hotbed of liberal sentiment, with the majority of earnest and righteous white folk aching to set their benighted brethren free by means of a just war. According to Robert C. Toll, throughout the United States, and particularly in intellectual circles of New England, the question of whether blacks were even to be regarded as human was the subject of intense debate in the nineteenth century (1974: 91). Murray claims that the consideration “of the dark-skinned person as a radically different kind of human being drew strength and popularity from the so-called scientific views of race first promulgated in the early nineteenth century” (1998: 119). Rainbow would have lived in a place and time in which racism was considered the received wisdom. Blacks were considered mentally and morally inferior. Living in New England for his entire life, Abbott witnessed and was deeply disturbed by racial prejudice. The North had its share of racists, as demonstrated clearly by Abbott’s portrayal in the Rainbow books of racial prejudice in New England. Abbott’s unique opening to Selling Lucky suggests that Rainbow, like many blacks in the North in antebellum America, experienced the pangs of racism. Selling Lucky begins: Although Rainbow was a colored boy, he was not at all disliked on that account. It is true that strange boys, when they first saw him, were apt to experience some feeling of aversion against him on account of his color

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and race, yet afterward, when they became acquainted with him, they very seldom failed to make a great favorite of him on account of his intelligence, his good-nature, and his readiness to assist and oblige every body, so far as it lay in his power. (p. 11) Although the narrator claims that Rainbow is not disliked because of his skin color, Abbott’s decision to begin his children’s literature volume by having his narrator insist defensively that Rainbow is not the victim of prejudice is telling. If Rainbow does not suffer the sting of racial prejudice, there is no reason to raise the subject, particularly at the onset of the novel. Numerous incidents and racist remarks in Selling Lucky and the other four books in the Rainbow and Lucky series contradict the narrator’s assertion in the first sentence that most white people in his New England town exhibit no racial prejudice toward Rainbow. Quinlivan observes that throughout the Rainbow and Lucky books, “Abbott made the reader aware of the prevalence of racial prejudice in antebellum America. . . . Each time he took the reader along with Rainbow or Congo [another black character created by Abbott] into a new environment, Abbott demonstrated the burden which discrimination placed on blacks” (1982: 31). For instance, in Handie, Rainbow complains that he dislikes school because the white children refuse to sit near him. In Rainbow’s Journey, Mr. Burkill does not wish to allow Rainbow to enter the stagecoach with him because the latter is black. In Selling Lucky, as Rainbow seeks a buyer for Lucky, the horse he has been asked by Mrs. Blooman to sell, two young men “who pretended to be working on the road, but who were really idling away their

Figure 6.1 “The Lucky Escape,” Frontispiece, Selling Lucky (NY: Harper & Brothers, 1860). Image courtesy of Pat Pfleiger, from www.merrycoz.org/books/lucky/LUCKY.HTM.

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time with talk and laughter, paused when they saw Rainbow coming, and looked very earnestly upon him” (p. 76). The two lazy men mock Rainbow because he and Lucky are both black: “I say, friend, something is the matter with your horse. He is black in the face—he is going into a fit. You had better stop and have him doctored.” “Oh no,” said the other, very seriously, “nothing is the matter with him. He only looks black in the face to keep his rider in countenance.” The two young men laughed aloud at this, and declared that Rainbow and his horse were a match. (p. 77) The men dehumanize Rainbow, suggesting that because of his skin color he is no different—or better—than the horse he rides. Furthermore, by suggesting that Lucky is ill because he is black, the idle men imply that Rainbow is also not well, thereby linking the race with disease. Immediately afterwards, Rainbow and Lucky encounter other prejudiced people on the road: People were sometimes quite uncivil in accosting Rainbow as he passed. For instance, a large boy, with a gun on his shoulder, who was climbing over the fence to come into the road while Rainbow was going by, stopped for a moment on the top of the fence, and then called out, “I say, Blacky, is that a horse that you have stolen?” To such impertinences as these Rainbow returned no answer, but rode on without taking any notice of them whatever. (p. 79) The large boy addresses and categorizes Rainbow solely by the color of his skin and assumes that because a black young man is riding an expensive horse, he must have stolen it. The large boy, like the two lazy men, mocks Rainbow as he rides an expensive horse. Perhaps Abbott correlates racism to some extent with socioeconomics, for the people who deride Rainbow with racist comments and accuse him of stealing, such as the two lazy men who are supposed to be working on the road, tend to be white members of the lower-middle class, people who would feel threatened by the rising black middle class in New England. A contemporary Harper’s Weekly cartoon exemplifies the link between this supposed threat and racism. In 1861, Harper’s Weekly published a cartoon of a well-dressed black man being ridiculed by two lazy working-class white boys eating licorice while sitting idly on a wall; the caption reads, “Hello Bill! There goes the CRISIS!” (p. 86). The cartoon indicates the artist’s awareness of white jealousy of, and antagonism toward, the rising black middle class in the North. Abbott’s Rainbow books, particularly Rainbow’s Journey and Selling Lucky, employ a picaresque style that allows Rainbow to encounter a wide variety of people, some of whom manifest disdain for the protagonist because of his skin color. This picaresque aspect of the children’s books enables Abbott’s readers to discern how both open-minded and prejudiced people interact with

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Rainbow and how the good-hearted black free man deals with racism on a frequent basis. The first two sentences of Selling Lucky, cited earlier, seemingly contradict one another: people do not dislike Rainbow because of his skin color, yet for the same reason they experience an aversion to him. The narrator’s second sentence, the concession of the initial aversion experienced by those who encounter a young black man, seems to imply that such racial hatred is inevitable, even in New England (which was considered more progressive than the South) and that Rainbow has to overcome obstacles, such as negative first impressions caused by the color of his skin. Now that it is clear that although the narrator claims that Rainbow is not disliked for being black, the texts contain numerous examples (such as the four cited above) of racial prejudice, how can the reader account for this apparent contradiction? Perhaps the answer is that only prejudiced characters decline to interact with Rainbow and thus openly express their disdain for him. Those characters who get to know Rainbow overcome their prejudice. Perhaps Abbott learned from his contemporary Eliza Follen about prejudiced white characters shedding their racist thoughts after interacting with virtuous black children. Anne Scott MacLeod mentions that in Eliza Follen’s children’s literature story “May Mornings,” published in Twilight Stories in 1858 (one year before the first Rainbow book), Harry, a virtuous black child, is badly mistreated by a large white boy who makes horrible racist remarks. “Harry himself soon returned good for evil, thus converting the erring boy to a more humane view of color differences” (quoted in MacLeod 1975: 113). Similarly, Abbott indicates in the opening sentences of Selling Lucky that those people who harbor prejudice would see their folly and learn to shed their racial hatred if they would simply get to know virtuous black people such as Rainbow. Abbott shows the reader this means of overcoming racism and prejudicial initial opinions not only in Selling Lucky, but in all his Rainbow books. In The Three Pines, when Rainbow delivers a message for Handie, Mrs. Blooman “wound up by telling Rainbow himself never to dare to show his sooty face upon her premises again. ‘For if there is any thing in the world that I absolutely hate,’ she said, ‘it is a nigger.’ So saying, she wheeled round and stalked off into the house, slamming the doors after her” (p. 67). Always willing to turn the other cheek and to repay hatred with kindness, Rainbow is hurt by the insult, but he repays Mrs. Blooman with kindness. Upon learning that Blooman’s horse, Lucky, has escaped, he recovers the colt for her. Touched by Rainbow’s altruistic act shortly after her racist comments, Blooman realizes that her prejudice is unfounded and hateful. Perhaps Abbott hopes that his readers will learn from her example by giving people a chance to prove themselves. Ashamed of her past behavior, Blooman invites Rainbow to sit in her kitchen—in the same house from which she has just ejected him, slammed the doors in his face, and indicated that he is never welcome—and she feeds him well. Seating Rainbow in a nice chair in her house, Mrs. Blooman “went into the pantry, and, taking an

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apple-pie down from the shelf; she cut out a large slice for him. When she had cut into the pie once from the circumference to the centre, and then was placing her knife again, measuring with her eye the proper distance for a good generous slice, the thought of the rude and cruel manner in which she had spoken to Rainbow when he came to see about the saw occurred to her mind, and she immediately moved the knife along several degrees on the edge of the plate, so as to make the slice larger still” (pp. 94–5). Blooman’s decision to invite Rainbow into her kitchen and her moving of the knife to create a more generous slice of pie indicate her recognition that her racial prejudice is unwarranted and mean-spirited, as well as her repentance for her racist feelings upon witnessing the virtue of Rainbow. Subsequently, Blooman entrusts her valuable young colt, Lucky, to Rainbow, hiring the hero to escort the horse to Boston to sell it for at least $125—a large amount of money in 1860, particularly when one considers that in Rainbow’s Journey, Handie and Rainbow perform many home repairs for Mr. Dorling over several hours for a total of seventy-five cents. In fact, the average factory wage in New England in 1860 was approximately $20 per month (Census 1866: 512; Derks and Smith 2005: 380–1). Abbott demonstrates that if racist whites, such as Blooman, would simply interact with black people, discovering first hand the goodness that they possess, whites would not prejudge black people and would shed their racist initial reactions. Abbott signifies that possessing more information about someone and interacting in a positive manner with the person in question allows people to change their minds; racial prejudice, then, can be overcome and diminished. People can alter their original views on issues such as race provided that they are subjected to people whose comportment can change their minds and dispel initial prejudices. Rainbow feels that he must work proactively rather than passively because white New Englanders do not make a strong effort to shed their prejudice. Acutely aware of prejudice expressed toward him based on his skin color, Rainbow acts benevolently toward strangers, attempting eagerly to make a positive first impression so that he will not be disliked. It is apparent that Rainbow is excited, for instance, when he sees Mrs. Blooman’s son come to ask a favor for his mother: the narrator reveals that Rainbow “said he would look out for a chance to do Mrs. Blooman a favor, and here is one come to him all ready at hand” (Three Pines: 62). Rainbow likes to help white people not only because he realizes that his kind behavior will diminish their prejudice against him, but also because benevolence and innocence are innately part of his character. To encourage his white readers to eliminate any racial prejudice that they foster, Abbott introduces to his predominantly white readership an exemplary black hero—virtuous, courageous, unblemished, and innocent. Abbott wishes to show his readers that blacks possess excellent characteristics, so whites should respect and harbor no ill will toward them. To make his point, Abbott focuses on Rainbow’s innocence, which strongly resembles the hero’s purity in William Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” (Songs of Innocence 1789). Although Blake’s poetry

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was not widely popular because of his supposed madness and his unpopular ideas, such as his desire for racial equality, his poetry was popular in some circles in Abbott’s day, particularly with those who shared his abhorrence of slavery and his quest for equality for blacks. Distinct and unmistakable correlations exist between the innocent black child in Blake’s poem “The Little Black Boy” and Abbott’s characterization of Rainbow. The little black boy in Blake’s poem is told by his mother to bear the burden of racism and to accept it meekly: And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love; And these black bodies and this sunburnt face Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove. For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear, The cloud will vanish; we shall hear his voice, Saying, Come out from the grove, my love & care, And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice. (11. 13–20) The mother advises the little black boy that if he meekly accepts the burden of racial injustice, God will love and reward him for his suffering on earth with happiness in the afterlife. He must suffer currently for a future reward. Similarly, Rose, Rainbow’s mother, warns Rainbow in Selling Lucky to accept racism patiently, without fighting back: “ ‘He [a black person] must rely wholly,’ she used to say, ‘on his patience, forbearance, and good-humor for his protection from insult and wrong. You can not right yourself by force,’ said she, ‘for you are only one, and they are a great many. But if, when they injure you, you bear it patiently, and return good for evil, they will be ashamed of themselves in the end, and will treat you better than they otherwise would have done, in order to make up’” (pp. 211–12). Thus, Rainbow’s mother, like the black mother in Blake’s poem, informs her son that if he patiently accepts racial hatred and acts benevolently, he will receive a future reward. Innocence, therefore, will be rewarded ultimately, but unfortunately both black mothers assume that their sons must endure punishment because of the racial prejudice that is predominant in their culture. The theme of innocence and the connection with Blake continues when white horse thieves, who have made racist remarks to Rainbow, plot to steal Lucky; they think that it will be easy to outsmart an innocent black boy. Rainbow reassures the horse, “I am here, and it’s all right. Don’t you be in the least uneasy. If those fellows get you away from me, either to-night or to-morrow morning, they are sharper than I think they are. And as to color, it is my opinion that that sort of fellows are black fellows a great deal more than either you or me’” (Selling Lucky: 90). Rainbow indicates that he is hurt by the thieves’ prejudice against him. His comment that the thieves are blacker than he and Lucky is intriguing, for it suggests that Rainbow has appropriated and accepted the

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discourse of racial prejudice that permeates his society. He sees white as innocence and black as the absence of it. This discourse resembles the symbolism employed by Blake’s Little Black Boy, who says: And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child, But I am black, as if bereav’d of light. (ll. 2–4) The Little Black Boy, clearly indoctrinated into the white-dominated English society, considers his soul white (innocent), as if a soul contains color. He has been taught by the racist cultural mores (and by his own mother) that white is good and innocent yet black is the opposite. That is why he considers angels to be white and blacks as bereaved of light (lacking in the light of God, who is the rising sun). Similarly, Rainbow’s comment that the white thieves have black souls indicates that he considers black to be bereft of innocence and goodness. Rainbow considers his skin black but his innocent soul, white. Abbott creates several situations in which this honest black young man encounters deceptive and sinister white men. These situations clearly contradict and subvert the notion of prejudiced readers who assume that the virtuous and intelligent characters would be white and the thieves would be black. Such situations might make readers reevaluate their preconceived notions and realize that black people such as Rainbow are virtuous and are loved by God as much as the white readers are. In Rainbow’s Journey, Handie asks Rainbow if the sun is too warm for him, “’No,’ said Rainbow, ‘the sun is never too warm for me. The brighter he shines the better I like him’” (p. 135). This quotation resembles Blake’s poem when the black mother mentions that the boy must learn to bear the beams of love and the heat of the sun, and that his ability to bear the sun’s warmth will eventually enable him to help the white boy and earn his love: I’ll shade him from the heat, till he can bear To lean in joy upon our father’s knee; And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair, And be like him, and he will then love me. (ll. 25–8) Similarly, Rainbow bears the sun’s warmth well and protects Handie and many other white characters, thus earning their love. In Blake’s poem, which resembles Abbott’s point in the Rainbow series, the lines “the rising sun: there God does live, / And gives his light, and gives his heat away’” (Blake ll. 9–10) suggest that the innocent blacks who meekly suffer the pain of racial prejudice are very close to God and that He loves them. Another indication of Rainbow’s good-hearted character and behavior, which should endear him to readers, is that animals instinctively trust him. Abbott manifests the bond between the protagonist and animals with the example of

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Lucky, the valuable black colt who, at the beginning of Three Pines, is barely schooled and all but uncatchable. After Rainbow works with the horse for a short time, the reader discerns a touching rapport that arises between Rainbow and the horse to whom he has become emotionally attached. This touching bond, along with Rainbow’s honesty, greatly diminishes the racial prejudice of Lucky’s owner. Mrs. Blooman, causing her to allow the hero to take the expensive colt by himself to Boston for sale (in Selling Lucky). It is worth noting that Rainbow has taught the colt to be a well-mannered and agreeable riding partner, greatly increasing his beauty and value. Every animal that Rainbow encounters in Abbott’s series, from a frightened half-wild farm cat to dogs being teased by bored children to the hard-working stagecoach and carriage horses and clever Lucky, seem to recognize instinctively that Rainbow will cherish and protect them as friends, not as servants. With Rainbow, both animals and children realize that they are in safe hands with Rainbow. The protagonist’s kindred spirit with animals suggests not only that Rainbow is an animal lover, but also that there is something spiritually clean about him, that the animals sense that they should follow him as they did Noah in the Book of Exodus. Furthermore, animals are God’s creatures: God made them (Genesis 1:25), and He said: For every beast of the forest is Mine, And the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the mountains, And the wild beasts of the field are Mine. (Psalm 50: 10–11) The bond between Rainbow and the animals is linked to the bond between Rainbow and God. Based on Abbott’s New England Congregationalist background and his desire to inculcate children with Christian values, it is possible that Rainbow embodies Christian attributes: Jesus claimed, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also” (Matthew 5:38–9). Rainbow follows this practice after feeling the brunt of racial insults from Mrs. Blooman, Mr. Burkill, and other prejudiced people whom he encounters. Rainbow’s Christian behavior should endear himself to the readers and earn respect from them—even those readers who harbor racial hatred in their hearts and who thus represent a segment of the audience that Abbott attempts to reach. By portraying Rainbow as innocent and godly, Abbott manifests how prejudice can unfairly malign a virtuous person. A subtle hint of Abbott’s purpose occurs in Selling Lucky when Handie, Trigget, and Rainbow pick up a new passenger, a college boy. Handie and Trigget express disappointment because they believe that all college students are conceited and snobbish. To their surprise, the college boy, William, is very nice and affable. Handie and Trigget reevaluate their previous prejudice and realize that they have erred by

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stereotyping and being prejudiced against a group of people. They vow to be more open-minded in the future and to avoid prejudging others. The narrator warns his readers: “Indeed, I think it may be laid down as a general rule, that if you hear a specially unfavorable account of any person whom you do not know, you will find, when you come to get acquainted with him, that he does not more than half deserve the ill account which was given of him” (p. 29). Similarly, in Rainbow’s Journey, Trigget incorrectly assumes that Burkill has stolen a woman’s pocketbook. After realizing that Burkill is innocent, Handie notes that Trigget was mistaken. Handie remarks to Rainbow, “it shows us that we ought to be pretty careful how we judge and condemn people” (p. 126). These instances of jumping to conclusions and prejudging innocent people serve as Abbott’s metaphors concerning racism and demonstrate to readers that they, too, should avoid stereotyping people and should evaluate them as individuals. Recognizing that some white readers might not comprehend the ramifications of racial prejudice and the hurt faced by those who are victimized by it, Abbott takes great pains to show how racist remarks hurt Rainbow. Children’s literature specialists Carl M. Tomlinson and Carol Lynch-Brown note, “Walking in someone else’s shoes often helps children to develop a greater capacity to empathize with others. . . . Children around the world can benefit from stories that explain what life is like for people who are restricted by disabilities, politics, or circumstance” (2002: 4). Abbott demonstrates his focus on empathy, linked with mercy, in The Three Pines when Handie asks Rainbow to practice copying lines from Alexander Pope’s “Universal Prayer”: Teach me to feel another’s woe, To hide the fault I see: That mercy I to others show, That mercy show to me. (ll. 37–40, quoted in The Three Pines p. 156) Handie then says to Rainbow—and transparently to Abbott’s readers—“That verse contains an excellent rule for us to follow” (p. 157). Abbott could have selected any passage from literature; he chooses one about feeling the pain of another and consequently treating that person mercifully. These are emotions he wants his white readers to comprehend as they read about Rainbow’s suffering from racial prejudice. This empathy in the reader could ultimately lead to activism. Abbott’s books enable children to empathize with a young hero who is treated badly because he is black. In Rainbow’s Journey, when the black protagonist boards the stagecoach, Trigget says to Handie, “‘I don’t like the looks of one of my passengers.’ Rainbow’s heart sank within him at hearing these words. He was so much accustomed to be made an object of ridicule and reproach, and to be treated with indignities of all sorts on account of his color, that whenever any disparaging intimations were made in a company in which he was present he instinctively considered them as intended for him” (p. 14). Stung often in the past by discrimination deriving from his skin color, Rainbow

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immediately suspects that Trigget refers to him. Although Trigget actually speaks about Burkill, Rainbow does not feel relieved because that passenger had complained because he feared that a black boy (Rainbow) would be riding inside the stagecoach with him. Rainbow also feels scared in Rainbow’s Journey when he and Handie are away from home and must spend the night in a barn. Handie goes to sleep immediately, yet Rainbow cannot sleep: [T]he going away from home of a colored boy like Rainbow is a much more momentous event for him than such a change is for a white boy. A white boy, if he is of an amiable disposition and behaves well, even if he goes among entire strangers, soon makes plenty of friends. The world is prepared every where to welcome him, and to receive him kindly. But a boy like Rainbow feels that his fate is to be every where disliked and shunned. In every strange town that he enters he expects that the boys, instead of welcoming him as a new companion and playmate, will be ready to deride him, and to point at him, and to call him opprobrious names. . . . Rainbow felt this very sensibly. (pp. 56–7) Thus, being away from home and amongst people who do not know Rainbow’s innocence and kind disposition places the protagonist, because of his race, in a precarious and vulnerable situation. When Rainbow travels alone to Boston in Selling Lucky to sell Mrs. Blooman’s black colt, he unwittingly endangers his life. Because Rainbow does not have Handie, Trigget, or any family member to protect him, Handie provides him with two letters of introduction that praise Rainbow’s conduct and honesty. One letter says, “This may certify that the bearer of this, commonly called Rainbow, colored boy, is well known to us, and to all the people of this town, and that he is a boy of excellent character” (p. 45). This letter, signed by the selectmen of Southerton, suggests that the virtue of the black hero is insignificant and unreliable until it is validated by the powerful white people of the community. The second letter states that Mrs. Blooman has given permission for Rainbow to sell Lucky, indicating to prospective buyers that Rainbow is not a horse thief. To prejudiced citizens, Rainbow is merely an unworthy black boy until they read the letters. The letters, which Rainbow has to use on a few occasions, encourage people, including those inclined not to like him because of their racial prejudice, to trust Rainbow and to help him. Without these letters, Rainbow’s task and his ability to gain the townspeople’s trust would be significantly more difficult. For instance, when Rainbow asks to speak with the railroad ticket manager, Mr. Jones, the man laughs condescendingly: he wore “a comical expression of countenance, as if he was somewhat amused at the idea of a colored boy like Rainbow having any business that he could consider worthy the attention of a railroad officer of his rank” (p. 124). He thinks that a black person is undeserving of having business with a dignified ticket manager such as himself. But when Jones reads the letter, he acts more respectfully toward

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Rainbow and agrees to help him: “The reading of this papers [sic] appeared to produce considerable effect on Mr. Jones’s mind. At any rate, after reading it, he seemed disposed to treat Rainbow with much greater consideration” (pp. 124–5). Mr. Jones begins to treat Rainbow well not because of Rainbow’s integrity, but rather because the white selectmen of Southerton vouch for his honesty in a written document. Furthermore, without letters that attest to his good character, Rainbow could be captured and sold as a slave; although the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 concerned the capture of escaped slaves, unsavory slave traders, nicknamed “blackbirders,” sometimes refused to distinguish between escaped slaves and free black men. The acceptance of the One Drop Rule and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act made trafficking in stolen human beings easier—and legal. Many free blacks were captured and sold into slavery by slave traders, and their unfortunate stories, such as that of Solomon Northrup, show the potential for danger in Rainbow’s journey. Solomon Northrup, a free black born in New York in 1808, was kidnapped by the slave trader James H. Burch in 1841 while visiting Washington City (now Washington, D.C.). Although Northrup was a free man, he was captured by Burch and enslaved for twelve years. In his autobiography, entitled Twelve Years a Slave (1853), Northrup regained consciousness after being kidnapped: I found myself alone, in utter darkness, and in chains. . . . I was handcuffed. Around my ankles also were a pair of heavy fetters. . . . I felt of my pockets, so far as the fetters would allow far enough, indeed, to ascertain that I had not only been robbed of liberty, but that my money and free papers were also gone! Then did the idea begin to break upon my mind, at first dim and confused, that I had been kidnapped. But that I thought was incredible. . . . There must have been some misapprehension some unfortunate mistake. It could not be that a free citizen of New-York, who had wronged no man, nor violated any law, should be dealt with thus inhumanly. . . . I replied [to Burch] that I was sick, and inquired the cause of my imprisonment. He answered that I was his slave—that he had bought me, and that he was about to send me to New-Orleans. I asserted, aloud and boldly, that I was a free man a resident of Saratoga, where I had a wife and children, who were also free, and that my name was Northrup. . . . He denied that I was free, and with an emphatic oath, declared that I came from Georgia. (pp. 19, 20, 23) Although Northrup possessed papers proving that he was a free black, those papers meant nothing once Burch stole them from him. Northrup’s freedom depended not upon his character or status as a free man, but rather upon his papers, which when stolen by an unscrupulous slave trader (actually, the term is redundant), places him at the mercy and control of that person. Without papers, Northrup lost what few rights he possessed. This historical example manifests how Rainbow’s trip to Boston endangers him; if Rainbow were

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kidnapped, the law would not have been sympathetic to him. He shows his papers to several people, but if one of them had destroyed these as Burch did Northrup’s papers, that person would render Rainbow vulnerable and place the boy under his control. Rainbow’s name is significant, partly because it is a nickname, not a given name. The name was not bestowed on him by his parents at birth, but rather as he grew older and developed a personality that delineates who he is and how he acts; thus, the name Rainbow reflects his character, such as his sunny disposition in adversity. The rainbow might suggest his connection with animals because a rainbow appeared when Noah, who brought forth animals, developed a kindred spirit with them as Rainbow does, and saved them, sees that the rain has ended. It is an optimistic moment because God has established His covenant with human beings and animals, promising never to hurt them again with another flood: I establish My covenant with you. . . . Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood; never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. And God said: “This is the sign of the covenant which I make between Me and you, and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for the sign of the covenant between Me and the earth. It shall be, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the rainbow shall be seen in the cloud. (Genesis 9:9–14) God’s covenant with human beings initiates the first rainbow. The rainbow, then, represents hope for the future of human beings. Abbott saw the horrors of racism in New England, with a society rigidly demarcated by race. He perceived the virtuous and innocent Rainbow, who earns the respect of white people who interact with him, who eventually earns a job as a mailman delivering letters to white people, and who earns—through his virtue—the right to purchase the black colt Lucky, as hope for the future of race relations in America.

Chapter Seven “I am your slave for love”: Race, Sentimentality, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Fiction for Children Lesley Ginsberg

In a portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe that appeared in one of the most selfconsciously literary children’s periodicals of the postbellum 1860s, Our Young Folks offers a stunningly equivocal tribute to “one of its best friends and most prized contributors.” While Stowe is faintly belittled as the author of “that wonderful miniature of slavery, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’” this stilted biography highlights the extent to which middle-class New England households were all too ready to protect their children from the radical legacy of antebellum movements for social justice: as Our Young Folks flatly proclaims, “There is no need to-day of an ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’” Though the editors concede that Stowe’s most famous work was borne out of the author’s “outrage” as well as her “high sentiment of justice,” by January of 1866 Our Young Folks could soothingly declare that the Civil War had been domesticated: “the stormy times are past. . . . slavery is no more. . . . and so Mrs. Stowe [now] busies her pen with gentler topics,” writings for children whose distance from the looming questions of a postbellum America are figured as “stories” penned “in the cosey comfort of her happy home.” Yet if slavery has disappeared from the American political landscape, its metaphors seem strangely to have lingered in the prose of Our Young Folks’s most notable abolitionist: in one of those “gentler” stories published in March of 1865, Stowe confronts the child reader with a deliberately humanized pet, who, if he could speak, would proclaim to his loving and benign “master”: “‘I am your slave for love.’”1 From 1865 to 1870, Stowe contributed a wealth of stories to Our Young Folks, a magazine that could be called a juvenile Atlantic (both were published by the

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prominent firm of Ticknor and Fields). Her prestige as a contributor is perhaps signaled by the fact that the first work featured in the first edition of Our Young Folks is one of her stories (“Hum, the Son of Buz”). Other contributors to Our Young Folks in these years include Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Louisa May Alcott. Until recently, however, if this facet of Stowe’s career was mentioned at all, her writings for children were typically dismissed as the mostly mercenary productions of a writer who “wrote for money” (Hedrick 1994: 322). More recently, Brandy Parris has looked at what she dubs “the Reconstruction animal story” in Our Young Folks (2003: 29) and found allusions to race written into these tales, as I do, though some of Stowe’s most remarkable pieces go unmentioned (including the sentimentally enslaved pet above). Gillian Brown’s intriguing discussion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in terms of nineteenth-century pedagogies of literacy and antebellum interest in literature that “promoted the distinctiveness of children” (2004: 82) nevertheless slights Stowe’s postbellum fiction for children, works that complicate our understanding of Stowe’s best-known novel and its relationship to contemporaneous literatures of the child. Finally, Stowe’s stories in Our Young Folks can be linked to preceding decades of abolitionist–humanist children’s literature with which Stowe would have had at least a passing acquaintance, literatures that can be discussed in relation to their adult counterparts in a series of cartoons (two that appear to be signed by Thomas Nast) and an editorial that appeared in Hearth and Home in 1869, when Stowe edited that story-paper. Written during a period in which Stowe was recoiling from the horrors of the war and withdrawing from the demands of feminists who would soon pressure America’s most established woman writer to enlist her talents on behalf of women’s rights, Stowe’s writing for children represents not only a retreat into a fantasy of domestic peace, but an attempt to bandage over the raw wounds of a national discord that threatened to inflame those Americans—including white, middle-class women—who still found themselves tacitly or literally disenfranchised, despite the promise of equality that lingered in the aftermath of the war. Stowe’s fiction for children calls out for reconsideration in light of the extraordinary political ferment in which it was produced. Yet these works may also be contextualized in relation to a large body of antebellum children’s literature about slavery, including works that reflect both sides of the abolition debate. Stowe’s fiction for children is rooted in polemical children’s antislavery works by abolitionists including Eliza Cabot Follen and Lydia Maria Child, though the double-edged sentimentality of her juvenile works can be thrown into relief when read against comparable Southern juvenile literatures. Stowe’s stories can also be situated in terms of a British tradition of humanist children’s literature exemplified by Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories (1786) as well as the poems of Ann and Jane Taylor; these British works and their antebellum American counterparts rely on the figures of speaking creatures to promote humanist aims. Finally, Stowe’s fiction in Our Young Folks can be considered in terms of her concurrent work on behalf of the American SPCA that appears in

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the pages of Hearth and Home when she edited that periodical. By situating Stowe’s work thusly, her postwar fiction for children reveals a retreat into a regressive fantasy of domestic harmony, served up to a Northern reading public that feared its own success in the postwar battle for racial and social equality. Stowe was no stranger to the realm of children’s literature or the impulse to remake the child that characterized antebellum literature more generally. Involved from her youth in her sister Catharine Beecher’s pedagogical experiments as both a student and an educator in her own right, Stowe’s maiden publication in book form was a Primary Geography for Children (1833). Though the geography is filled with lurid tales of savage Africa—stigmatized as “the most degraded and uncivilized” area “of any of the four quarters of the globe” (p. 72)—in an aside that reeks of Yanky-philia if not burgeoning abolitionism, the Geography teaches that in the southern United States, “The white people scarcely work at all, but buy negroes to do their work” (p. 98). The Geography also bears the traces of a nascent interest in the rights of women: in a rhetorical gesture that invites the antebellum reader to contemplate familial inequalities both abroad and at home, Stowe informs the child-student that in underdeveloped Pagan societies a man may legitimately refer to his wife as “‘my slave’ or ‘my dog’” (p. 53); in other words, these are countries in which “there is no such thing as liberty” (p. 51). Later, when Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared as a serial in the National Era, Stowe closes the last installment with a direct appeal to an audience of children: In particular, the dear little children who have followed her [the author’s] story have her warmest love. . . . Never . . . let a colored child be shut out of school, or treated with neglect and contempt, because of his color. . . . when you grow up, we hope that the foolish and unchristian prejudice against people, merely on account of their complexion, will be done away with. Farewell, dear children, till we meet again. (“Concluding Remarks” 1852) Stowe’s motherly, didactic finish, which attempts to enlist the youthful reader in a practical (if visionary) plan for social reformation, is famously written out of the novel version; yet Stowe’s original “farewell” to America’s “dear children” highlights the extent to which Stowe imagines the child reader as an integral part of her audience, a gesture that in turn invites us to consider Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a species of children’s literature.2 At the same time, the novel’s revised ending ultimately diffuses the political charge inherent in the National Era version: the specter of an integrated North in which the “colored child” is admitted into the precincts of American social equality. Though E. Bruce Kirkham’s study of the differences between the two versions concludes that Stowe’s original ending was “appropriately” removed because it threatens to trivialize the novel’s claims as a serious (hence adult) work (1977: 183), Susan Belasco Smith argues that its removal is a political as well as

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an aesthetic gesture. As Smith points out, Stowe’s publishers may have interpreted her closing gesture as a marketing risk. The strategy of promoting the unique talents of an author as a particular commodity is undercut by serialization, since readers of serialized fiction have the “opportunity to participate closely in” or even to shape “the narrative . . . by writing letters to the editor . . . as many of Stowe’s readers did.” Further, while Stowe’s deleted remonstrance to white children, urging them never to exclude their black peers from school, was appropriate for an abolitionist paper such as the National Era, Smith points out that the antebellum “reading public” may well have been “unwilling to contemplate” Stowe’s call for integration in schools (1995: 71–2); after all, Bronson Alcott dealt the death blow to his pedagogical career in Boston just twelve years earlier by admitting a black student into the classroom (Dahlstrand 1982: 147). Finally, the implicit assumption of childish power in Stowe’s National Era remarks—the notion that it is the child, rather than the adult, who has the power to decide who may or may not be “shut out of school”—may have been distasteful to the proponents of old-fashioned parental power, whose perquisites were already under attack by well-meaning reformers from the rarified transcendentalism of Elizabeth Peabody to the public school practices of Horace Mann. If the vision of the mixed-race classroom was so controversial that it was banished from the novel, consider the mere specter of integration in the postbellum North. Toward the end of 1865, Lydia Maria Child published The Freedmen’s Book (1865), a primer aimed specifically at the newly emancipated, whose incipient political maturity haunted the tentatively reconstructed Union. Though Child was motivated to compile this reader out of a genuine belief in racial equity (as she put it in a letter to her publishers, Ticknor and Fields, “The two races are here together, and together they must stay”), The Freedmen’s Book also inadvertently teaches us about the extent to which the possibility of integration loomed ominously, even in the abolitionist imagination.3 And if the very form of The Freedmen’s Book—a primer for newly literate freedmen— implicitly (if unintentionally) infantilizes adult ex-slaves, Child admonishes these newly freed people in terms that group former slaves with two other classes of inarticulate dependents, small children and domestic animals: “slaves . . . have often reminded me of overworked and abused oxen; for though slaves were endowed by their Creator with the gift of speech, their oppressors have made them afraid to use it. . . . Therefore, those who have been slaves know how to sympathize with the dumb creatures of God; and they, more than others, ought to have compassion on them” (p. 97). If Child seeks to integrate ex-slaves by exhorting them to develop a sentimental taste for the burdens that come with caring for dependents, Lori Merish argues that the figure of the pet in Stowe’s fiction serves a similar function: to inculcate an appreciation of “exemplary objects of middle-class proprietorship” (1996: 16). And as Katherine Grier concludes in her study of pet-keeping in Victorian America, “The expanded world of kindness and feeling which helped

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to create, and then justified, intense interest and emotional investment in pets was a byproduct of the formation of middle-class culture” (1995: 117).4 Yet Child’s efforts to humanize slaves by allying them with domesticated beasts of burden (ultimately incorporating both species into the home circle of humanitarianism) raises the problem of infantilization, a gesture by which the dynamics of power and domination are sentimentalized by figuring the owner/ employer as the benignant parent of mute, helpless, dependent creatures. When Child’s prescriptions for integration are read in relation to contemporaneous Northern children’s fiction in Our Young Folks—stories in which animals frequently figure—Child’s formulas invite us to consider the extent to which these stories that specifically concern the care of speechless, dependent creatures may also reflect similar anxieties about the integration of the racial or social other into the fabric of Northern bourgeois culture. Consider Stowe’s first contribution to Our Young Folks: the story of an injured hummingbird, half-drowned during a rain-storm and nursed back to health, “Hum, the son of Buz” (1865). In a fantasy that reflects the narrator’s own condition as a middle-class woman who is protected from the need to earn her keep in the stormy economy outside the home, the narrator imagines how the cosseted animal might voice its gratitude: “‘how nicely they have dried and warmed me! Truly a bird might do worse than to live with them’” (p. 2). As the narrator’s interpolation confirms, captivity—including the confinements of middle-class motherhood—provides its own sentimental consolations. Or, as a light essay that appeared in the Atlantic in June of 1860, “The Humming-Bird” puts it, “the meek-looking mother- [humming] bird only comes out between daylight and dark—just like other busy mothers I have known, who take a little run out after tea”: “Ah! you know nothing, hear nothing of woman’s rights up there, in that well-ordered household” (p. 659). Read in this light, Hum’s charm depends on the creature’s softened fall from wild freedom to domesticated dependency. In an echo of Child’s prescriptions for what she calls the “humane” (p. 97) treatment of dependents, Hum is succored by a “small humane society” (p. 2). Though the narrator puns on the original society—organized “for the rescue of drowning persons” (OED)—her quip also evokes the spectacular variety of humanitarian reform societies that characterized the Northern cultural landscape in the decades leading up to the Civil War, groups that found themselves confronting years of their own rhetoric promising racial and social equality. If the dilemma of the hummingbird can be read as a metaphor for Northern anxieties, we discover that Hum cannot be integrated into the family home back in Boston; the bird becomes “lonesome” (p. 6), pines, and dies. Isolated from his brethren in a “humane” yet ultimately hostile environment, the bird is killed by kindness; he falls ill after falling into the “tumbler” of “sugar and water,” a gesture that epitomizes death by sentimental sweetness (p. 6). His death absolves Stowe’s representative family of the far more difficult task of incorporating a foreign creature into its hearth and home.

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Stowe’s story invites its child readers to consider the limits of tolerance in the North, a theme that was earlier broached in her original conclusion to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and one that is played out in other tales in Our Young Folks in the era of Reconstruction. These limits are also revealed in other contemporaneous Ticknor and Fields publications, including Sidney Andrews’s exposé, The South Since the War (1866). Andrews complains that for many white Southerners, “[The negro] is actually to many of them nothing but a troublesome animal; not a human being. . . . ‘I would shoot one just as soon as I would a dog,’ said a man to me yesterday” (p. 100). Yet at the same time, Andrews hastens to remind his Northern readers of “the inexorable fact” that the negro problem is a Southern problem: “the negro is in the South . . . and must remain [t]here till God pleases to call him away. The problem involved in his future must be met on the soil of which he is native; and any attempt to solve it elsewhere . . . will be futile” (p. 21). Nehemiah Adams’s apologist travelogue A South-Side View of Slavery (1854)—reprinted by Ticknor and Fields in 1860—also exhorts Northerners to be grateful that the burden of African–American uplift has been shouldered by the South: “As an ardent friend of the colored race . . . I believe that . . . subordination in some form to a stronger race is absolutely necessary for their protection. . . . If our Southern brethren will protect and provide for them . . . we, as friends of man . . . owe them a debt of gratitude” (pp. 121–2). If integration was openly feared in the North, the threat of miscegenation loomed large. The word “miscegenation” first appeared during the election of 1864, as the title of an anonymously published pamphlet by David Goodman Croly. This pseudoscientific term, with its echoes of animal husbandry, was invented by Croly by combining the Latin Miscere, to mix, with the Latin Genus, for race. Though his salacious pamphlet purports to celebrate the erotic possibilities of race mixing, Croly’s pamphlet was pure Democratic party propaganda, intended to discredit Republicans. 5 In addition, other racial extremists within the party then used Croly’s work as a pretext to respond with incendiary pamphlets of their own, including a vicious series of “AntiAbolition” pamphlets published by John H. Van Evrie and Rushmore G. Horton. This firm also published Horton’s A Youth’s History of the Great War in the Unites States (1867), a revisionist work that counsels that it has been “proved beyond a doubt that the negro and the Caucasian . . . are distinct races or species of men. . . . [thus] we cannot expect the same things of them. . . . No one expects a mastiff to be hound” (p. 46). Josiah Clark Nott, a medical doctor and self-proclaimed ethnologist who discoursed at length on the dangers of miscegenation, articulates his fears in similar terms: “The natural history of the human family runs a curious parallel with that of the canines. . . . In America we have all the breeds of dogs and all the breeds of men almost of the earth, and no one believes that the Jew, Anglo-Saxon, Negro, or Indian will change types as long as blood is kept pure. The only fear is that we shall become a nation of curs . . . if the doctrine of miscegenation is carried out” (1866: 16).

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Even abolitionists seemed to have second thoughts about their commitment to racial equality in the immediate aftermath of the war. Three months after the publication of “Hum,” the first installment of Stowe’s series “Our Dogs” appeared in Our Young Folks (March 1865). If Uncle Tom’s Cabin can be said to flirt with the pleasures of bondage—and if the novel itself was written in part with the dependent, disenfranchised child reader in mind—Stowe here romanticizes servitude to an extent that almost repudiates the overt abolitionism of her most famous novel. As the narrator begins in language that conflates home and nation: “We who live in Cunopolis are a dog-loving family.” Yet the narrator’s sentimental “dog-loving” home in “Cunopolis”—language that conflates home and nation—fails to reflect the ostensible democratic politics of the nation-state in which it is a part; rather, sentimentality thrives upon the masking of inequality: “we have been always kept . . . under the paw, so to speak, of some honest four-footed tyrant” (p. 178). Though canine Carlo would be king, his reign is threatened by a human pretender—paradoxically the family’s most dependent human member—“the youngest, dear little . . . Charley,” who is “king over us all” (p. 178). The tale, the first in a series of five on “Our Dogs,” is at least semi-autobiographical. Set in Ohio, the first installment tells the parallel stories of the family dog Carlo and the death of “dear little bright-eyed Charley” (p. 178), the child Stowe and her husband called “little Charley,” born during their Cincinnati sojourn, of whom Stowe would write in her “famous letter” to Eliza Follen: “It was at his dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her.” If Stowe credits the death of her Charley with the creation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the dead child whom she characterizes in her letter to Follen as “the most beautiful and the most loved” of all her children, who “lies buried near my Cincinnati residence” (p. 413), it is worth noting that “Our Dogs” reprises the emotional conditions that led to creation of her antislavery novel, though here she would seem to be amplifying the novel’s sentimentality while retreating from its bolder abolitionist pedagogies, particularly as reflected in the call for integration at the conclusion of the National Era version of the novel.6 Published in the March 1865 edition of Our Young Folks—about five weeks before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox—Stowe’s story would seem to offer a reappraisal of the master/slave relationship through the sentimental allegory of a human child and his beloved but subservient pet. Carlo is originally the property of another family, employed to “do duty watching and guarding” (p. 178). Allowed to visit Stowe’s family, the affectionate Carlo resists his return to a home where “Nobody petted him, or stroked his rough hide, or said ‘Poor dog!’ to him” (p. 178). Charmed by “our warm-hearted little folks, who told him stories, gave him half their own supper, and took him to bed with them sociably,” it becomes necessary “to drag him back by force, and tie him into his kennel” (pp. 178–9). When the “chain” fails to keep Carlo from running back to the Stowe family, his owner gives him up, while Carlo, if he could speak, would seem to make a declaration of willing dependence: “he declared himself. . . . the slave

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and property of our little Prince Charley” (p. 179). Like little Eva’s solution to the problem of her cousin Henrique’s treatment of his slave Dodo, whose very name transforms the master/slave relationship into one of owner and pet—when Henrique beats Dodo with his “riding whip,” adding insult to injury by referring to his slave a “little lazy dog” and an “impudent dog” (Uncle Tom’s Cabin: 231), Eva obtains Dodo’s undying loyalty by calling him a “good boy” (p. 232), and instructs her cousin to “love poor Dodo” (p. 237)—in “Our Dogs,” the problem of slavery can be amended through the sentimental power of kindness. Just as Dodo is moved to “tears” by “a kind word, kindly spoken” (p. 232), the key to Carlo’s willing subservience can be traced to an almost insatiable desire for approval: “he seemed to have a yearning for praise and love and caresses that even all our attentions could scarcely satisfy. His master would say to him sometimes, ‘Carlo, you poor, good, homely dog—how loving you are!’” (“Our Dogs”: 179). Carlo has “great, honest, yellowish-brown eyes . . . which used to look as if he longed to speak” (p. 179), though his inevitable silence leaves the final word to his human interlocutors. Finally, ironies emerge when comparing Stowe’s prescriptions for ameliorating inequality and its discontents in a selfconsciously Northern publication with those that appear in the confederate First Reader, for Southern Schools, whose 1864 imprint makes it almost contemporaneous with Stowe’s story. As this reader teaches, in terms that uncomfortably mirror the romanticizing of slavery in Stowe’s tale, “When you read in the Word of God of servants you may know that they were slaves, owned by their masters. It is not a sin to own slaves. It is a right.” Yet “It is a sin to treat a servant ill.” As this rebel Reader concludes, “It is not best to set him [a slave] free, but to keep him and be kind to him.” “When a master and his servant are both good, they love each other” (pp. 16–17). While Stowe’s Carlo willingly enslaves himself for love and kindness to his young “master,” the dog is described in terms of a breeding fetish that echoes the miscegenation obsessions of the postbellum white imagination: as a “full blooded mastiff,” Carlo is a “dog of blood” and “lineage,” who has “all the good points of his race” (pp. 179–80). Thus, if Stowe romanticizes inequality in the name of family harmony, her tale also exploits the language of race, a rhetorical gesture that invites us to consider whether the story posits the link between owner and pet as a wishful, sentimental fantasy of race relations in the postwar period. Despite Carlo’s willingness to serve his master, his service comes at a price: “if any trenched on his privileges, he would give a deep warning growl— as much to say, ‘I am your slave for love—but you must treat me well, or I shall be dangerous’” (p. 180). Further, Louise E. Chollet’s “Dog Carlos,” which appeared in the October 1865 edition of Our Young Folks, recasts the implications of Stowe’s tale in an oddly human light. Her story begins with a twist: “Dog Carlos was not a Newfoundland, a mastiff, a terrier, or a dog of any of the breeds with which you are used to romp.” Like Stowe’s Carlo, who was a “tawny-yellow” (p. 178), Dog Carlos has “smooth, yellow skin, large, soft eyes,” and can “fetch and carry.” As

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the narrator teases, Dog Carlos is a “fine and valuable animal” who “would sell any day in the market for five or six hundred dollars,” and, as Carlo did, Dog Carlos is about to run away from his “master”; indeed, a transfer of ownership changes the eponymous hero of the tale from “a good and docile dog” to a “bad designing one”; it is at this point that the narrator coyly reveals that Dog Carlos is in fact “a lively mulatto lad,” given to a white boy “as his dog” at the age of six; the narrator explains “that is the name by which such little slaves are called” (p. 644). Dog Carlos escapes a brutal new master, only to realize that running is obsolete now that “‘dem dear, good Yankees’” have arrived (p. 650). Although Dog Carlos finds “a famous engineer on the underground railway, which you known is the line on which runaway slaves come North” (pp. 647–8), he fails to leave South Carolina after emancipation; rather, though “there is an old and false story about a wicked and cruel sorceress that had a disagreeable habit of turning men into beasts . . . we have . . . a sweet and good enchantress called Liberty, that turns dogs into men” (p. 651). Chollet’s tale amplifies the latent allegories of race relations in Stowe’s piece, while, like other stories in Our Young Folks that appeared in the year of Reconstruction, it is horrified by the specter of black migration North. One month after Stowe’s equivocal allegory of postbellum harmony appeared, Our Young Folks published another tale that makes the relation of child to pet an explicit metaphor for race relations, though this story resists the temptation to romanticize dependency, and in so doing proffers a very different version of postwar America. In “Nelly’s Hospital,” Louisa May Alcott—herself a Civil War nurse—offers the tale of a little girl who plays nurse to a motley collection of nonhuman foundlings, while self-consciously playing to her brother, recently injured in battle and recuperating at home. Yet unlike Stowe’s tale of sentimental enslavement when Nelly begs permission of her mother to nurse “sick birds,” “butterflies,” and other small creatures, she is warned not to let her hospital “become a prison” (1875: 267). With a little “amb’lance” modeled on those that served the Union soldiers, Nelly scours the countryside for the injured; her first “patient” is a black fly rescued from a spider’s web (pp. 270, 271). But lest the sheer homeliness of Alcott’s conceit tempt us to read the story as a purely aesthetic romp, the narrator makes sure that Nelly’s new charge is described in terms that invoke the racial dimensions of the war: little Nelly has “heard much about contrabands, knew who they were, and was very much interested in them; so, when she freed the poor black fly, she played he was her contraband”— she even goes so far as to name him “Pompey” (p. 272). Unlike Stowe’s fantasy of willing servitude, “Nurse Nelly” (p. 271) grants her pet the “liberty to fly away whenever he liked, because she had no wish to make a slave of him,” even sentimentally (p. 272). Thus, when we consider that the Freedmen’s Bureau sent contraband to Boston just after the Civil War, Alcott’s allegory takes on a distinct and pointed urgency, one that also highlights the distance between her visions of racial and social parity and the more equivocal sentimental allegories proffered by Stowe.

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Further, Alcott’s story is fundamentally informed by the conventions of abolitionist juvenile literature, in which the human/animal relationship is linked to the dynamics of master and slave. Hannah Flagg Gould’s allegory “The Prisoners Set Free,” which appeared in Lydia Maria Child’s Juvenile Miscellany in 1831, makes the analogy between pet-keeping and slavery explicit when the Elsworth children liberate their beloved caged pets. As their mother affirms, though her children’s “little captives could not speak, to make the feelings of their hearts known,” there is “no doubt” that “they had longed for freedom as much as the poor Africans do, who have to live and die in bondage to white men” (p. 207). Although these tales are themselves rooted in late eighteenthcentury British traditions of humanist children’s literature that feature speaking creatures, many of these works—read on both sides of the Atlantic—were altered to suit abolitionist aims when reprinted in such compilations as William Lloyd Garrison’s Juvenile Poems for the Use of Free American Children of Every Complexion (1835) or the periodical The Slave’s Friend (1836).7 One of the most notable juvenile antislavery authors who contributed to this tradition was Eliza Follen; in her letter to Follen, Stowe acknowledges at least a passing familiarity with Follen’s work: “I have long been acquainted with you, and during all the nursery part of my life made daily use of your poems for my children” (rpt. Uncle Tom’s Cabin 1852: 413).8 Follen’s Hymns, Songs, and Fables for Young People (1833, revised 1847) remained in print through the mid-1850s, years that correspond to the “nursery part” of Stowe’s life. This collection includes such explicitly antislavery pieces as “Remember the Slave” (“Think of the negro mother, when / Her child is torn away, / Sold for a little slave—O, then / For that poor mother pray!”) and “Children in Slavery,” whose two stanzas contrast free children, who “play the livelong day, / Like birds and butterflies,” with slave children, who play “with fear all day, / . . . Then joys decay, and birds of prey, / Are hovering o’er the land” (pp. 54–5). In “The Little Slave’s Wish,” the eponymous speaker tropes the desire for freedom through naturalistic metaphors of the untamed, in wishing to be a “little bird,” a “little brook,” “a butterfly,” a “wild, wild deer,” a “little cloud”; even the declension into being “a savage beast” and dwelling in a “cave” is preferable to being a “slave” (pp. 69–71). The “Fables” section includes a number of poems that feature former pets relishing their freedom in terms that recall Follen’s abolitionist aims. In “The Honest Bird,” a “prisoner” caged bird pines for “liberty” (the word is repeated three times in the first stanza alone); he finds “freedom” by convincing a mouse to gnaw “a hole” through his cage. “Soliloquy of Ellen’s Squirrel, on Receiving his Liberty” (pp. 76–7) allows the recently freed animal to relish “the sweet sound of Liberty” from a “free and unconfined” space outside of cage and home. Despite “many thanks” for “tenderest care,” the liberated captive is most grateful for his previous owner’s “best gift—sweet Liberty!” (p. 76). And in “Billy Rabbit to Mary,” a former pet rejoices “to be free,” regardless of the kindness of his keeper, who “was very attentive to the little prisoner, gave him an abundance of good things to eat, and tried her best to

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make him happy”; as the liberated creature puts it in a “letter” to his former owner, kindness cannot ameliorate the longing for “sweet Liberty”: “The food you gave me was pleasant and sweet, / But I’d rather be free, though with nothing to eat” (pp. 91–2). In her recent study of antislavery children’s literature, Deborah C. De Rosa reads this “seemingly frivolous poetic epistle” as having “abolitionist overtones” (2003: 118), as do I. Further, the antislavery aims of Follen’s fable are thrown into relief when compared to a similar poetic romp that appeared in Caroline Gilman’s children’s paper The Southern Rose Bud, published in Charleston in 1833. Rose Bud confounds antislavery homilies when it offers “Frank, To His Rabbit,” an ode to the pleasures of pet ownership: “No doubt your little heart did beat, / While aunt Flora tied your feet, / . . . Little Rabbit! Young and bright, / You are now my heart’s delight!” The poem’s juvenile speaker sentimentally affirms: “I cannot wish you to be free / You’re worth a diadem to me!!” (p. 182). When read in terms of the abolitionist tradition, what is most striking about Stowe’s work in Our Young Folks is how it abdicates those conventions in favor of a sentimentality that can be allied with juvenile proslavery, an alliance that may speak to anxieties over the spectre of black migration North in the aftermath of the war. If Stowe links the possibility of integration to an ideology of loving bondage in which one “race” voluntarily serves another and Alcott offers the child reader a parable that harks back to the conventions of abolitionist children’s literature, in which the selfish desire to possess is abdicated in favor of equality, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps portrays the specter of black migration to the North as an almost unthinkable event. In “How June Found Massa Linkum,” which appeared in the May 1868 number of Our Young Folks, Phelps envisions a meeting between a Southern slave girl and Abraham Lincoln. Young June’s life is an endless round of suffering at the hands of the abusive Madame Joilet, a Southern mistress who is also a “Frenchwoman” (a gesture that happily blames the evils of slavery on one who is clearly foreign and probably Catholic) (p. 272). Guilty of raising her slave girl in a state of crushing ignorance—“whenever Madame Joilet made those funny little curves and dots and blots with pen and ink,” June thinks her mistress is possessed by “witches”—Joilet decides to keep her slave in the dark about emancipation (p. 272). So the war ends, emancipation is proclaimed, yet nothing changes for June—she’s starved, beaten, and shut-up in a rat-infested cellar as usual. As if taking her cues from Stowe’s Topsy, for whom the transformative power of little Eva’s love effects a behavioral reformation that was impervious to the influence of the whip, Phelps’s consummately sentimental tale asserts that the real horror of June’s existence is that she has been raised without affection: “What was worse” than any beating was that poor June “had nobody to love and pet her” (p. 272). As is typical in so many children’s stories of the period, June finds her double (and a substitute for familial affection) in a black kitten: June names the kitten “Hungry,” because, according to her experience of racial difference, “everything black was hungry” (p. 273). Yet the news of the

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emancipation finally reaches our love-starved heroine when the Yanks parade through town, led by none other than that man whom the blacks in the story call “Massa Linkum” (p. 273). Perched against a fence, in a “ragged dress,” with “the kitten squeezed in her arms,” June watches the passing show until she catches the eye of Mr. Lincoln himself (p. 273). The illustration that accompanies the story depicts June at this moment—the white bars of the fence contrasting with June’s blackness as if the barriers of race are as legible and as solid as the railings, while the fence itself reads as a metaphor for segregation, even as its horizontal bars seem to echo the stripes of the embattled Union flag in abstract (Figure 7.1). But the narrative that follows is a lesson in the sentimental gaze: “The great man. . . . looked right at her, O, so kindly! and gave her a smile all to herself” (pp. 273–4). In a plea that echoes the appeal of the newly emancipated to a nation that proclaimed itself transformed by the war, June calls out to the President of the United States, “Take me ‘long wid yer, Massa Linkum . . . !” but she speaks “faintly,” “no one heard her,” and “the hot tears came.” Yet June doesn’t cry because Lincoln won’t take her North: “You see,” the narrator explains, “in all her life, no one had ever looked so at poor June before” (p. 274).

Figure 7.1: June watching “Massa Linkum.” In Phelps, “How June Found Massa Linkum.” Our Young Folks 4:5 (May 1868): 274.

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If this tale teaches the child reader that the sentimental gaze alone is enough to compensate for our national sins, it also teaches middle- and upper-class Northern children that they need not force themselves to make material changes on behalf of the freedmen, since this story—and its illustration—offers ample opportunity for us to look kindly upon little June. Yet this retreat into feeling right is precisely what is most disturbing about the story’s logic. Though President Lincoln is transformed into a sentimental aesthete with a “thin, white face, sad-eyed and kindly” (p. 273), as a reader who might materially alter June’s situation, Lincoln is a flop—his eyes seem to see, but his ears fail to hear. June’s material needs remain spectacularly unfulfilled. When June spontaneously lights out for the North, in search of that particular Northerner who gazed upon her so kindly, the girl gets lost in the woods and dies of exposure. Though the narrator hints that June will ultimately meet Lincoln in heaven, the real shocker of this story is its refusal to imagine June’s safe passage to the land of Lincoln and Our Young Folks. What is most frightening about this tale is that while June finally finds “some one to love her at last,” she gets what she needs when she no longer needs anything, having ascended to what the narrator describes as “a land where there was never slave and never mistress” (p. 279)—in short, a heavenly country that is not and will never be the postbellum United States. In what reads as a coda to her attempts to smooth over looming questions of racial inequality through a sentimental ideology of kindness in her stories of animal care for children, Stowe devoted considerable attention to the question of animal welfare while editor of Hearth and Home magazine in 1869. In “The Rights of Dumb Animals,” Stowe would seem to turn the tables on Lydia Child’s comment that slaves remind her of beasts of burden, silenced and muted; here, rather than amplifying the voices of silenced humans, Stowe turns her attention to the far less controversial question of kindness to nonspeaking creatures: If there be any oppressed class that ought to have a convention, and pass resolutions asserting their share in the general forward movement going on in this world, it is that hapless class who not only can neither speak, read, not write, but who have no capacity for being taught any of these accomplishments. . . . Christianity . . . has yet made but small progress toward softening the condition of the poor brute. . . . We rejoice . . . in the existence of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, whose monthly paper, published in the Society’s rooms in Boston, contains many words that ought to be deeply pondered by the community. (1869: 24) Using anecdotes of animal torture and a long excerpt lifted from the Massachusetts SPCA, Stowe maintains her cultural position as an advocate for the oppressed. Yet as the women’s rights debate and the spectre of black migration loomed in the political unconscious of the postbellum North, Hearth

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Figure 7.2: S[tephens], H[enry] l. “Plucking Live Geese Feathers.” Hearth and Home (24 April 1869): 288.

and Home ran a series of cartoons during Stowe’s editorship that invites readers to identify with animals rather than with the fates of women, workers, or racial others.9 Beginning in April of 1869, the paper offered its readers such opportunities to test their humanitarian impulses as “Plucking Live Geese Feathers” (Figure. 7.2), in which birds peck at a hapless human painfully sprawled on the ground, while others are pursued by menacing flocks. The series continued with such cartoons as “How Would You Like It” (Figure 7.3), in which a familial group of dogs prepares to clip the ears of a crying human, or “Put Yourself In His Place” (Figure 7.4), in which rodents rejoice that they’ve finally “caught the fellow at last,” as a human figure writhes half-caught in an elaborate trap; both of these cartoons appear to be signed by Thomas Nast. While this series invites the reader to interrogate the pieties of humanistic doctrines, the series as a whole is striking for what it alludes to but never articulates: the abuses and injustices visited upon Americans by Americans. This is not to say that Stowe’s interest in the amelioration of cruelty to animals is not an authentic concern about genuine creatures, nor to argue that Hearth and Home ignored the exploitation of humans by humans; yet what interests me here is the way that the series both stirs up the impulse toward humanitarian reform yet confines that impulse to the realm of the kind treatment of animals. Although Jennifer Mason has argued that “pet keeping and animal protection were not merely dematerialized sets of ideas existing only in the realm of text

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Figure 7.3: “How Would You Like It?/‘Come, you must have your ears clipped.’” Hearth and Home (8 May 1869): 320.0.

and imagination,” but were actual relationships “predicated upon interaction between human and animal bodies” (2005: 22), to deny the deeply race-inflected allegories of Stowe’s interest in the animal—ideas that are thrown into relief when Stowe’s stories are placed in the historical context of a culture that continued to link questions of race to the human/animal divide—is to deny the fundamental ways in which Stowe’s readers understood her work. As in Stowe’s tale in Our Young Folks, the reader is ultimately invited to sublimate the problem of human exploitation of humans in favor of the sentimental treatment of

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Figure 7.4: “Put Yourself in his Place/‘We’ve caught the fellow at last.’” Hearth and Home (22 May 1869): 352.

animals. Read in this light, Stowe’s work in Our Young Folks proffers a regressive fantasy of social and racial harmony through a sentimentalized version of slavery, a literature crafted for a new generation of readers for whom abolitionist pieties were suddenly outmoded, a literature rife with anxieties over the interracial present of a newly reconstructed nation. Notes 1

“Harriet Beecher Stowe,” Our Young Folks 2.1 (Jan. 1866): 59–60; Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Our Dogs,” Our Young Folks 1.3 (March 1865): 179, 180.

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I am grateful for Michael Winship’s insights in this matter; he helpfully pointed out to me that unlike other novels of the period (The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick), Uncle Tom’s Cabin was printed with illustrations, a gesture that links it to illustrated children’s material of the 1850s. Lydia Maria Child to James T. Fields, quoted in Karcher (1994: 496). See also Grier’s chapter, “The Domestic Ethic of Kindness to Animals,” in which she specifically analyzes the links between Victorian American childhood and pet keeping in Pets in America, 127-181. Elise Lemire offers a cogent and informed discussion of Croly’s pamphlet and fears of miscegenation in “Making ‘Miscegenation,’” a chapter in ‘Miscegenation’: Making Race in America, (2002: 117–44). Stowe to Calvin Stowe (23 July 1849), regarding the fatal illness of Samuel Charles Stowe, quoted in Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1994: 190); Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 239; Stowe, Letter to Eliza Cabot Follen (16 December 1852), rpt. in Ammons, ed., Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1994: 413). See also Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s discussion of Stowe’s memorializing of Charley (1999). In these cases, a poem by Ann Taylor was reprinted without a key companion piece, which effectively altered the work to suit abolitionist ends. This strategic omission is discussed in my essay, “Of Babies, Beasts, and Bondage,” (2003: 96–7). Follen authored a number of children’s books, including the explicitly abolitionist The Liberty Cap (1846) and her Anti-slavery Hymns and Songs (1855); she also edited the children’s periodical The Child’s Friend (1843–50). There was a running series in the 1869 edition of Hearth and Home that explicitly treated the exploitation of humans by humans: Frederic S. Cozzens’s five part series, “Torture By Authority,” in which he exposes and decried various physical punishments used in the American penal system, from the “the shower-bath” to the “lash” (1869: 265). Human-to-human abuse was thus not entirely ignored in the story-paper when Stowe was editor.

Chapter Eight Shut-ins, Shut-outs, and Spofford’s Other Children: The Hester Stanley Stories Rita Bode

Harriet Prescott Spofford’s long, prolific writing career spanned some sixty years, from the time of her first publications in the late 1850s until her death in 1921. She wrote novels, short stories, poetry, essays and critical pieces, and like many of her female contemporaries, included writing for children in her prodigious output. She contributed both fiction and poetry to the foremost journals for young people, such as Harper’s Young People, Our Young Folks, St. Nicholas, Youth’s Companion, and published collections of these contributions in several book volumes (Halbeisen 1935: 172–8). With the revival of interest in nineteenth-century American women’s writing, Spofford’s work has gained renewed critical interest since the 1980s along with an acknowledgement, as Alfred Bendixen states, of her “considerable literary importance” (1989: xxxiv). Critical assessments of individual works consistently reveal her sophisticated command of language and narrative skills.1 At its best, Spofford’s fiction is complex in both meaning and presentation. Spofford’s “stories for girls,” as they were promoted, the Hester Stanley stories, share in this complexity. Hester Stanley’s boarding school experiences, which were first serialized in The Youth’s Companion, were published in 1882 in book form as Hester Stanley at St. Marks. Two other volumes linked to Hester Stanley appeared in subsequent years: in 1891, A Lost Jewel, which, as the “Author’s Note” states, was a story told to Hester at school, and, in turn, related by her to other friends; and, in 1898, another collection of stories with its self-explanatory title, Hester Stanley’s Friends. These works seem to constitute traditional fare in nineteenth-century children’s and youth literature. They appeal to a wide age range of young female readers, for they focus on the freedoms and beauties of the outdoors, including the intricacies of plant and animal life to which younger readers are drawn; on the conflicts among friends

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and siblings; and on the burgeoning interest in the opposite sex that speaks more directly to adolescent readers’ concerns. Depictions of tensions between children and authority figures, such as parents, grandparents and teachers, receive balance through the reassuring support that the adult world, aware of its privileges and responsibilities, extends to its children. But alongside the reassurance, Spofford forefronts social attitudes and conditions that marginalize children and adults alike. Thelma J. Shinn positions Spofford as “a strong spokesperson for independent womanhood” (1984: 45), and, as her “stories for girls” suggest, for independent girlhood as well. Spofford’s Hester Stanley is the kind of outspoken, physically active girl that Anne Scott MacLeod finds recorded in the memoirs and autobiographies of American women whose childhood occurred before about 1875 (1994: 3–29), and Spofford, moreover, in contrast to McLeod’s findings, seems to put little curtailment on her young female characters who are already adolescents. These stories, for the most part, assume gender equality and openly value female achievement and potential. Nonetheless, they have a dark edge, for other kinds of difference operate here, the difference of race, poverty, ethnicity and disability, all accompanied by their hurtful effect of othering. Spofford treads a fine line; her representations often seem to endorse mainstream views. They seem to suggest the kind of problematic handling, especially of race and ethnic issues, that some recent studies see in her adult fiction. But they also display a persistent resistance. Alison Lurie observes that “most of the great works of juvenile literature are subversive in one way or another: they express ideas and emotions not generally approved of or even recognized at the time . . . and they view social pretenses with clear-eyed directness, remarking—as in Anderson’s tale—that the emperor has no clothes” (1990: 4). The subversion is quieter in Spofford’s stories than Lurie’s claims demand. But it is also stronger than the “unconscious subtexts” that MacLeod allows for children’s literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (1994: viii). Spofford’s “subtexts” are purposeful and fully conscious. Her stories for girls take on significant societal prejudices of their time and in subtle but sure ways work to probe, challenge and undermine them.2 Spofford’s first collection, Hester Stanley at St. Marks, with its focus on Hester herself, presents the most sustained narrative, and, in its explorations of racial difference, seems the most consistently subversive of the three. Spofford’s presentation of race is not without controversy. In her study of “The Amber Gods,” Lisa Logan focuses on the little Asian slave and her juxtaposition with the story’s self-assertive heroine, Giorgione Willoughby, to suggest a disturbing race politics in Spofford’s vision in which “the perspective of its marginalized nineteenth-century white, upper-middle-class heroine/ narrator, Giorgione,” is advanced “at the expense of . . . the troubling characterization of a woman of color,” of the racial other (2001: 35–6).3 Jennifer Putzi’s summary of Spofford’s racial representations both exonerates and condemns when she writes that Spofford’s “conception of race and racism is quite typical of her period. . . . her depictions of African American characters are often sympathetic

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and complex but also marked by the racist stereotypes commonly used by many nineteenth-century American writers” (2000: 326). Malini Johar Schueller puts forward a different view of Spofford’s approach to the alien, racial other. Basing her conclusions on the story, “Desert Sands,” she argues that Spofford critiques “the appropriation of the Near Eastern Orient and the naivete with which US Americans believe they can, as an ostensibly noncolonizing power, righteously interpret and bring civilization and moral order to the Near East” (1998: 109). Schueller’s views of Spofford’s attitudes to racial issues seem applicable to the account of Hester’s first year at Miss Marks’ boarding school. In Hester Stanley at St. Marks, Spofford’s undermining of society’s racist attitudes is consistent and sure. Central to her questioning of racial issues in this work is her positioning of Hester, for while establishing her American lineage, Spofford deliberately makes Hester’s race indeterminate. Our first glimpse of Hester is of “a dark little body” (p. 3). Her physical characteristics of “dark skin and . . . dark eyes” (p. 12) are a frequent focus in her descriptions. She tells Marcia Meyer, who is to become her good friend, that she comes from “‘out there’” (p. 6): “In the South Sea Islands, you know, where I was born—” “Where you were born? Dear, dear! are you an African, or an Asian or—” “I suppose I’m a Polynesian,” said Hester half laughing. “I’m dark enough, you see—I’m so tanned.” (p. 7) Hester’s “half-laugh” suggests that she is half-serious, and also, perhaps, halfright. “‘Papa,’” she goes on to tell Marcia, “‘is an American’” (p. 7); but she says nothing about her mother. Hester, as the narrator later explains, is “without any mother” (p. 21).4 The silence surrounding the unnamed mother includes the possibility that she, too, is from “‘out there.’” Hester significantly never says that she herself is an American. Indeed, she declares herself nation-less: “‘I never had a home. . . . I never even had a country’” (p. 5). When Marcia questions her with “‘What in the world did you have?’” (p. 5), she names her father “who was all she had, whom she adored” (p. 4). All meaning lies in the (American) father who, despite his nationhood, resides in the islands. With Hester’s arrival at boarding school in America, the process of acculturation to American ways, which, in nineteenth-century America, would inevitably include the privileging of whites, should supposedly begin. On a visit to Marcia’s home, moreover, Hester falls to “adoring with a forgetful worship the first white baby she had ever seen” (p. 41). Her act startles twenty-first-century readers with its seemingly blatant endorsement of racial hierarchy—white trumps nonwhite. But the story unfolds in a very different way. Spofford provides some suggestive similarities between Hester Stanley and Jane Eyre. The nineteenth-century girls’ boarding school setting inevitably

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evokes Jane at Lowood school, and Brontë’s novel was a Spofford favorite. Later in the nineteenth century Spofford wrote an appreciative introduction to Jane Eyre, and allusions to the Bronte sisters’ works surface in other of her writings. Like Jane near the beginning of her novel, Hester gazes out the window, in the opening of hers, at a dreary rainy day, her back turned on the realities of her present situation. Hester is already at St. Marks, in contrast to Jane who is still at her Aunt Reed’s home, Gateshead Hall, but both will go on to achieve success in their respective boarding schools. They share certain characteristics of blunt speaking and short tempers. Both are locked up for passionate outbursts, a proclivity over which they slowly gain control. Like Jane’s friendship with Helen Burns, Hester also has an other-worldly friend in little Maud, whose spiritual outlook urges obedience and good behavior. Maud’s illness and early death echo Helen’s, and both provide their surviving friends with an inspiration to goodness. Jane Eyre, for the most part, however, functions as a kind of touchstone for Hester’s character, since the association between them seems to stay on the surface. Maud, for example, does not linger in Hester’s consciousness with the same intensity as Helen does in Jane’s, and Marcia always holds the central position among Hester’s friends. But the presence of Jane in Hester’s presentation remains provocative, for Spofford modifies her Jane-figure significantly by giving her Bertha Mason’s island background. Hester, from the south sea isle of Samoa, shares with the Jamaican Bertha what Susan Meyer calls Bertha’s “odd ambiguity of race,” which, like Spofford’s handling of Hester’s race, “is constructed by the text itself, rather than one that needs to be mapped on to it.” Meyer argues that “in the form in which she becomes visible in the novel, Bertha has become black as she is constructed by the narrative” (1996: 67). In Jane Eyre, the black Bertha is a threatening figure, eliciting fears of the racial other as a dark and savage creature. In a contrast that is remarkable in nineteenth-century literature, Spofford makes her “dark” Hester (1882: 3), in all her alien foreignness, the story’s central point of attraction, drawing to herself characters and readers alike. Hester’s relationship with Maud presents the reader with a racially charged image when Spofford, in describing their close friendship, focuses on their color contrast: “they crossed their forefingers, the little brown one and the little white one—to mark the compact, and kissed across them before they strolled away with their arms around each other’s necks” (p. 31). The juxtapositioning of the light and dark-skinned child is already a motif in nineteenth-century American literature through little Eva and Topsy, who Stowe sees as “representatives of the two extremes of society. The fair, high-bred child, with her golden head, her deep eyes, her spiritual, noble brow, and prince-like movements; and her black, keen, subtle, cringing, yet acute neighbor” (1852: 213). Stowe provides reasons for their differences: “the Saxon born of ages of cultivation, command, education, physical and moral eminence; the Afric, born of ages of oppression, submission, ignorance, toil, and vice!” (p. 213), but whatever the reasons, Stowe sees the white child as superior to the darker one. Spofford treats the motif quite

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differently. She refuses to endorse racial hierarchy, emphasizing the girls’ equality: dark-skin and light-skin entwined. Some may say that she cheats. Hester’s darkness could be, as she suggests, the result of her time in the sun, and she is, after all, the daughter of a rich American merchant, not the marginalized property of a white slave owner. But Spofford’s refusal to assign a definite racial identifier to Hester informs the image and opens up possibilities of an equality that nineteenth-century America was still steadfastly resisting. Hester has come to St. Marks for a specific reason as she tells Marcia: “‘I must study. Papa means me to be a teacher out there, where they need them, and I can do them good’” (1882: 6). Hester’s “they” and her second “them” presumably refer to the native islanders. Her words imply a recognition of separation and difference that fits with the novel’s emerging language of imperialist ideology. Her assumption of responsibility hints at hierarchy. There is much talk in the novel of “heathen” behavior and “Christian” manners (pp. 12–13). The narrator explains that Miss Marks “in her own young days . . . had dreams of leading the same life that fate seemed to have marked out for Hester’s future, and had longed to help forward the race in obscure corners of the earth” (p. 20). Feeling disappointed in herself, Hester at one point sobs, “‘It’s no use to try and civilize me! I had better go back to my savages!’” (p. 92). The other girls sometimes taunt her about her alien origins. “‘How thankful I ought to be,’” says one, within her hearing, “‘that I was born in a civilized country and not among cannibals’” (p. 103). “‘Those half-naked savages!’” cries another, in response to Hester’s praise of the island people (p. 137). The attitude that this language expresses toward the inhabitants of non-European, southern countries would have been acceptable in nineteenth-century America. SánchezEppler points out that “by the 1880s the United States was the world’s largest source of Protestant missionaries to the ‘heathen’” (2005: 187). In the rhetoric of the nineteenth-century’s “cheap moral tracts” written for children, she finds explicitly articulated the “felt similitudes between the national projects of raising good, white, middle-class, Christian, American children and raising an economic and cultural American empire” (p. 186). But the obvious mean spirit behind the school girls’ talk suggests that Spofford is exploring another thread in nineteenth-century American thought that Melville perhaps most famously addressed at mid-century—the possible inversion of the savage and civilized. Hester expresses no desire to convert her island people, to inculcate specifically Christian beliefs, but she does want to bring them “up into the light” (1882: 185), inevitably implying that they now live in heathen darkness. When, near the novel’s end, Spofford has Marcia comment to her friend, “‘You’re a regular little missionary, Hester. You haven’t mistaken your calling,’” she uses the incident to rewrite the concept of “missionary” in secular terms as Hester couches the repercussions of Marcia’s disobedience in terms of social injustice: “‘it nearly killed Miss Brown,’” Hester points out, “‘and—and me. . . . And it lost the man his place, I suppose. And it disgraced the two boys.’”

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(p. 184). Spofford invokes Christianity in cultural rather than religious terms as a way of life that offers “enlightenment.” Hester thinks with gratitude and love of her father who brought her here over sea and continent, that she might not grow up like the little islanders, but might have, as other Christian children have, the benefit of all the world’s enlightenment . . . She knew what a happy dream of his it had been that the islanders . . . should become as thoroughly civilized and educated as American and European people are; and only those who cared for them would make the effort to bring that about. (pp. 162–3) Spofford’s language evokes a sense of Western, if not specifically Christian, superiority. To the recipients, cultural impositions are no less damaging than religious ones. Spofford links education to the American way when Miss Marks explains to Hester the authority that the St. Marks teachers have over her: “‘We should be your superiors if it were only for the fact of the vast difference between our knowledge and your ignorance; because, in America, education and knowledge are what constitute superiority’” (p. 13). In linking education also to knowledge, however, Miss Marks signals the novel’s rejection of the cultural domination that the education of an island’s people might imply. Spofford moves toward an ideal of inclusive education encompassing the knowledge that Hester gains at St. Marks as well as the knowledge that she imparts there. The novel repeatedly privileges the mutual sharing of knowledge, not the one-sided inculcation of beliefs and dogmas. The contexts in which she situates Hester’s ambitions and her relationship to her island people diminish the hints of imperialist agendas. Hester, as we have already seen, is herself of the island, from “out there,” and loves and cares about the islanders. Her intentions bespeak no impersonal plan of dominion that would impose abstract, American dogma on another people. She resists a hierarchy of difference that sees the islanders as “heathen” and Americans as “civilized,” when, after her first visit to the lively Meyer household, Hester, in her forthright manner, confides to Marcia, “’I think we both of us have some of the same work to do—missionary work to do. For, if I am going home to civilize my heathen’—‘I am going home, too, you mean,’ cried Marcia gaily, ‘to civilize my little savages!’” (p. 62). And Spofford makes clear that the “light” (p. 184) that Hester will be imparting to her islanders is directed at a people who already have a worthwhile knowledge of their own. Spofford presents the intercultural relations of Samoa and America as one between equals. Hester’s love for her island country is expressed lyrically, passionately and seductively, and the details of island life assume at times an inviting narrative prominence. In the midst of the work, Spofford interpolates her story of Sae of Samoa which enchants all the St. Marks listeners, and in response to which Hester expresses more than once sentiments that indicate

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“‘that is it exactly!’” (p. 144). The alien other transforms into a source of curiosity, interest and attraction. Spofford draws subtle parallels between the island’s “primitive” beliefs and accepted Anglo/American folklore, showing them both as means of explanations for the world’s patterns, and creative outlets for the human imagination. And perhaps most significantly, Spofford links Hester’s success at St. Marks, in large part, to her South Seas upbringing. The skills and knowledge that Hester brings from her islands become the means of her advancement at St. Marks. Hester’s ambition to take back to her island people what she learns at St. Marks is already in place, for she shares with St. Marks the special talents that she brings from the islands. She initiates a reciprocal process of education between her American schooling and South Seas living. Hester’s adept and lively guitar-playing makes her popular and gives her an early means of involvement in the community of St. Marks students. Her skill in swimming, moreover —“‘There is nothing I can’t do in the water!’” (p. 66)—gives her a position of leadership as she undertakes a class in swimming instruction. She even heroically rescues her nemesis, the unpleasant Miss Brown, from drowning. At the novel’s end, Hester, this “dark daughter of the South Sea” as Marcia calls her elsewhere (Hester Stanley’s Friends 1898: 203), wins the school prize, in part, because of her heroism, but also because of her academic excellence and the “mastery” she has acquired over her “wild and uncontrolled temper” (p. 187). But Hester has not been indoctrinated into docility. In a sense, she continues to defy authority, for taking control of the prize-giving, she deems herself insufficiently accomplished and wrests permission to bestow the award on another student, the student of her choice. Hester meets many challenges at St. Marks, but these do not include poverty. Not surprisingly for late nineteenth-century works, Spofford acknowledges the consequences of inadequate livelihoods in her other writing for youth. She does not gloss over the stark limitations imposed by poverty, partly perhaps because financial reversals were something she experienced in her own young days. Rescuing the poor was more than a Dickensian motif for Spofford, for the great volume of her literary efforts had its origins in her early struggles, as the eldest of five children, to support her parents and younger siblings when her father’s business ventures and health both failed. In A Lost Jewel (1891), Lucia, “the little girl with her tambourine, lying beside the hedge, unable to go on” (p. 19), draws the loving, maternal Mrs. Maurice’s attention with the result that “father and mother . . . had actually bought her of the cruel organ-grinder. And they had taken her home, and . . . made her one of their own” (p. 7). Mr. Maurice raises some doubts about taking Lucia into their family. “‘But do you think it wise,’ he questions his wife, ‘to bring a child from the streets, with all the familiarity with evil which that means, among our innocent little people?’” (p. 19). A Lost Jewel is an adoption narrative that acknowledges some of the crucial concerns of the adoption process. Spofford complicates the biological difference of the adoption story with the difference of experience that

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Figure 8.1: “Bella and Charlotte and I, after Everyone’s Asleep Tonight,” Hester Stanley At St. Marks, p. 168.

Figure 8.2: “Hester Was in the Sea and Had Reached the Drowning Woman,” Hester Stanley At St. Marks, p. 176.

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Mr. Maurice fears, and, even further with the difference, not of racial, but of ethnic otherness, for Lucia, as her name signifies, is Italian. Her “large soft Italian eyes” (p. 6) mark her as distinct in the Maurice family both physically and temperamentally. Both her “dark tresses” (p. 13) and activity associate her with the family’s “two tame ravens that Thomas was teaching to talk” (p. 6), for like them, she, too, is learning to “talk” English. The ravens are a source of amusement as well as trouble for they are known thieves, rifling countless of the family’s valuables. If her performances for the organ grinder partner Lucia with the little monkey, her life in the Maurice household also links her to the nonhuman, carrying similar hints of dehumanization. Spofford includes other disturbing suggestions about Lucia’s place in the Maurice family. “Everybody felt as if Lucia must be very grateful; Grandmother Maurice often told her she ought to be” (p. 7). Mr. Maurice’s mother, at whose home in the mountains the family spends their summers, can never fully accept the “‘little Italian beggar’” (p. 30) as she deems Lucia, and continues to see her as “an interloper” (p. 52), always “the guilty one” (p. 78), “‘too sweet to be wholesome’” (p. 81). Significantly, Spofford has the children challenge Grandmother’s prejudices. Rose, “who took a good deal upon herself, and assumed an equality that always amused her grandmother,” questions her severely— “‘Grandmother . . . what do you mean by that?’”— after one of Grandmother Maurice’s sarcastic comments concerning Lucia’s goodness (p. 50). The children’s recognition and censure of Grandmother Maurice’s prejudices toward Lucia establish a boundary between the child and adult worlds that is hopeful but also threatening, for power lies with the adults. Among the adults, doubts about Lucia’s character re-surface. She is never completely trusted. Missing or lost things raise suspicions about her. When the missing raven’s egg turns up in Lucia’s sewing basket, having accidentally landed there from the boys’ tossing it, even Mrs. Maurice doubts Lucia’s honesty: “For a moment or two Mrs. Maurice looked grave, and was very still. ‘In Lucia’s basket,’ she said then. ‘That is really dreadful. Oh, is she like that, poor child? And have I brought a child like that among my innocent little ones? And I believed in her so!’” (pp. 73–4). And she still does, for she quickly reaffirms her faith in her adopted child: “‘I do believe in her still. . . . This cannot be. We will keep quiet and find out. Some one put that egg-shell in Lucia’s basket’” (p. 74). But her momentary doubt and the defence of her own children that it evokes reveal the lingering sense of Lucia as an alien presence in the Maurice home. Lucia’s own loyalties, moreover, remain divided. She, too, wavers in trust, for she never accepts her place in the family as completely secure. Overhearing Mr. and Mrs. Maurice talking, she mistakenly believes that they are planning to send her away, back to the padrone, the organ-grinder. “‘How could you think such a thing of me?’” Mrs. Maurice wonders when she discovers Lucia’s fears (p. 134). Though on the one hand, she views Mrs. Maurice as her mother, she still wonders “a great deal about her own mother . . . if she had one, before the days of the padrone” (p. 110). She dreams about the possibility of someday going

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to Italy and finding her “own people,” but concludes that she “never can love them as I do these dear people who have saved me from being a beggar girl and taught me all I know” (p. 89). And yet, her most singular and unwavering devotion, and gratitude belong to poor old Catarina who had been kind to her in her deepest troubles when she worked for the padrone. Her attachment gives her a perspective that prevents her from engaging fully in the sympathies and activities of the Maurice family. The “lost jewel” of the title refers, most obviously, to the sparkling single stone in the beloved ring that Mrs. Maurice received from her husband at Baby’s birth. While the entire family searches for it, and determines to find it to make mother happy, Lucia soon gives up the search and thinks to herself “that the price of such a stone would keep poor old Catarina from hunger and cold this many a day” (p. 7), and would be enough to return the old woman to her beloved Italy. Later, she confides to Marnie, “‘it must be right, or mamma wouldn’t do it—but it seems queer for some people to keep things that are worth so much money, when they know of other people who need the money’” (p. 147). These views on the jewel leave her open to suspicion of its theft. Spofford frames the novel with the search for the lost jewel, introducing it at the beginning and returning to it at the end. The suspicion of Lucia’s part in the loss hangs over her throughout the work until grandmother asks her outright near the end, “‘Lucia, are you sure you know nothing about this stone?’” (p. 149), which finally gives her the chance to deny the silent accusation. A Lost Jewel is not a completely successful work. Spofford’s familiarity with Victorian literature helps her evoke a range of sobering elements. Abducted and abused children, familiar images in the Victorian novel, form part of the backdrop throughout A Lost Jewel. Lucia’s “bitter remembrances” include the weariness of “tired feet, and burning head” as well as the more disturbing abuse of “hunger, and blows, and disgust” (p. 69) while under the padrone’s control. She is rescued, but others are not. The “long, thin, black-haired child, in the sleep of such profound fatigue that it was almost impossible to wake her” whom Mrs. Maurice finds amidst “smells and noises, and dirt” (p. 17) when she searches for her own missing child, Jo, is simply left where she is found. She is not Jo, which is all that matters, and no more is heard about her. Lucia’s situation recalls, moreover, another Caterina’s, George Eliot’s in “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story,” the second of Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life. Like Eliot’s Caterina, Lucia is a young Italian female who has found refuge in an English-speaking family. As her association with the ravens suggests, Spofford sometimes seems to hint that Lucia is something of a plaything in the Maurice household, which puts in question her equality, a factor that Eliot expresses more boldly in Caterina’s position at Cheverel Manor; both protagonists have strong passions, tending toward a negative outlet in physical violence. Both have secret sorrows caused by emotional attachments, Caterina’s in her love for the wayward Captain Wybrow, and Lucia’s in her devotion to her older countrywoman, a more appropriate relationship for young readers. The comparison to Eliot’s

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Caterina accentuates the tragic potential with which Spofford invests her Italian protagonist. She suggests somber, dark possibilities for Lucia, but then she deliberately turns from them. Lucia’s moving story alternates with the Maurice children’s more ordinary joys and trials. Mrs. Maurice’s surmise when she first sees Lucia that “‘perhaps she belongs to princes and palaces’” (p. 19) is a little extravagant but closer to the mark of Lucia’s final fate than any hints of tragedy. The troubling aspects of Lucia’s ethnic otherness seem to give way to a fairy-tale ending. She is reunited with loving parents whose lack of royal connections does not detract from their ability to fulfill their daughter’s needs, both emotionally and materially. Spofford seems to keep tripping over her own subversions, evading what she has just suggested, or saying more than she had intended. She expresses a greater hesitancy in her handling of difference here than in Hester Stanley. This may be the result of weak or hasty writing, or the constraints imposed by the consciousness of a young readership; but most likely, it stems from A Lost Jewel’s charged subject matter of the American nation’s ability to embrace, or at any rate, accept, the ethnic other. Karen Sánchez-Eppler interprets the “affectionate family as the guarantor of American cultural superiority” (2005: 212), a paradigm that implies the close ties between ethnocentrism and American identity and nation-building. Spofford is clearly aware of the new nation’s struggle to incorporate ethnic and religious, and racial others into a pervasive identity. Several times in A Lost Jewel, Lucia is reminded of her newly acquired American status as a member of the Maurice family; Mrs. Maurice’s admonition to forget her past includes not only the bitter memories but her cultural heritage: “‘It would be better for you at any rate,’” counsels Mrs. Maurice, “now that you are in a new life, not to talk about the old one. . . . Don’t even think in the old language. Remember that now you are an American’” (p. 48). Significantly, Grandmother Maurice, who doubts Lucia “and who probably always would” (p. 135), is a significant spokesperson for American ways. “‘You must remember, Jo,’” she admonishes her favorite grandson, “‘that we don’t care anything about princes and marquises and that sort of stuff over here. Over here we’re all sovereigns. And it means more to the human race to be an American over here, than it does to be a crowned prince over there’” (pp. 115–16). As Jo points out, despite her strong stance, there is something of the “‘aristocrat’” about Grandmother; the sovereignty for “‘all’” which she so strongly endorses has its exclusions for there is no place for Lucia “among her own darlings” (p. 135). By the novel’s end, it is clear that the title’s “lost jewel” refers as much to Lucia as it does to the mother’s stone. She has been her parents’ “lost jewel,” and will now be the same for the Maurice family who begin at once to lament her departure. Plans are made for visits, but when Lucia, or Preciosa as her parents named her, re-appears in the last story of Hester Stanley’s Friends, “At Old Benbow,” she is present only through her letter. In the context of American nation-building, the adoption narrative fails, for Lucia returns to her own

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people and her own country. With her departure, Spofford solves troubling issues: the difficulty of acceptance and the demand for assimilation that the alien and foreign forefront in late nineteenth-century American society. Among the Maurice children, the jury stays out on whether Lucia is happy back in Italy. Her friend Marnie declares that “‘she’s perfectly happy. She has a father and mother . . . and she has everything’” (p. 272). But Joe thinks, “‘She’d like to be over here fast enough, and going tobogganing with us’” (p. 273). Lucia’s/ Preciosa’s words in her letter describing her own mountainside, “‘so cool and sweet and high and far up there’” (p. 271), suggest that Joe’s interpretation may reflect his own longing more than Lucia’s and perhaps Spofford cannot resist one last slight subversive suggestion that the loss is on the American side. Into the stories in her third volume for young people, Hester Stanley’s Friends (1898), Spofford again introduces, in varying degrees, the issue of poverty, and its effects on young people. These stories are not free of sentimental resolutions which often take the form of young protagonists helping those with less money than themselves achieve some modest fulfillment. But her focus in several of these stories involves a favored figure in nineteenth-century literature, the disabled child, as Spofford turns her attention to the implications of difference in physical disability and disfigurement. An accident leaves Rafe, the brother of Hester’s much-loved older schoolmate, Marcia, immobilized. In “April Showers,” Rafe, while still whole, mocks Marcia’s aspiration to angelic behavior, evoking the narrative comment that “Rafe before that accident was one boy, and Rafe afterward was another” (p. 89). Spofford’s Rafe does not represent the “boy-savage trope” of American literature’s Bad Boy figures—the most famous of whom are Tom and Huck—that Kenneth B. Kidd delineates (2004: 16). Her focus on Rafe “afterward” seems to cross gender lines, for invalids in American youth literature are usually girls who, in their illness or injury, come to represent a socially approved passivity and confinement in private, domestic space. Rafe seems to lie in the British tradition, invoking the quiet cheeriness of a Tiny Tim, but more pointedly, the ill and injured boys in some of the school stories appearing in the Boy’s Own Paper. Claudia Nelson’s discussions of these fictional boy invalids argue persuasively that Victorian fiction for boys “uses images of sickness . . . in precisely the same ways that girls’ fiction does” (1991: 25), with the injury or illness becoming the source of the invalid child’s spiritual and moral growth. The British stories make Spofford’s approach to her boy-invalid appear conventional; Rafe’s character improvement follows expectations. But Marcia’s admission to Hester in the earlier work, Hester Stanley at St Mark’s, that “nobody knows who . . . hurt him so. . . . We all did it” (1882: 51), presents a slight shift away from the customary. In contrast to a figure like Susan Coolidge’s Katy, whose anger and bad temper result in the deliberate act of disobedience that causes her debilitating accident, Rafe, despite his impatience, does not have a direct hand in causing his own injury. Spofford sees the responsibility for the injured child as communal. While

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her presentation endorses the association between invalidism and character growth, it interrupts the moralistic pattern that sees youthful disobedience resulting in dire personal consequences. Spofford rejects the implicit guilt and blame that such a pattern directs at the offender recognizing that it turns the invalid life into one of eternal expiation. If, in Rafe’s story, she accepts the good influence that invalids are expected to exert on those around them, she also insists that the community embraces the invalid in ways that facilitate his good influence. Because of their part in his accident, “the children are rather tender to Rafe” (p. 51), Marcia confides to Hester. They share the guilt but they too participate in the compassion. Spofford’s story of another one of Hester’s Friends, May Roberts, in “Remade,” disrupts the association between disability and moral character in a different way suggesting perhaps even more strongly its damaging tendency to lay blame. Whereas in Rafe, Spofford presents the invalid child as a moral center that draws others toward it for their betterment, May, born cross-eyed and hare-lipped, functions, to use Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s terms, as society’s “code for insufficiency, contingency and abjection,” excluded from the “supposedly stable, universalized normalcy” (1898: 136) that her “corporeal otherness” helps to define (p. 5). May just tries to get by, learning her lessons and playing in isolation with her dolls, but because of her looks, she considers herself a “monster” (p. 181), and believes that “a monster is not good! [God] wouldn’t ever have pronounced a monster good the way he did Adam and Eve in Genesis” (p. 181). Dr. Derwent to whom May reveals this self-assessment is quick to lay blame but not on May: “It is wrong that you should have been allowed to look on this thing so, my child,” he tells her (p. 181), seeing the monstrous rather in the “people who made a child’s deformity such a burden to her, or who suffered it to be made so by others” (p. 196). In contrast to Rafe’s small community which embraces him by sharing responsibility, May’s mocks her. Through the social attitudes expressed by those around her, May’s disfigurement creates a sadder not a better person. Dr. Derwent not only determines to fix May’s problem but also offers another way to view it: “I can prove to you that it is nothing but an accident, by undoing it” (p. 181), and he does. Spofford’s straightforward engagement with physical facial deformity, especially in a female adolescent, is not usual fictional fare. She rights May’s looks, but she resists the moralistic necessity that would position May’s disfigurement in terms of either moral inadequacy or moral superiority and considers rather the senseless social alienation that it imposes on her. Readers of Spofford’s earlier work, Hester Stanley at St. Marks, will know that May’s transformation was complete, for, at school, she is initially cast in the plumb role of the Fairy Godmother in the performance of Cinderella. Spofford’s representations of lively, strong girlhoods are reassuring. Writing her literature for young people in the postbellum years, she is significantly leaving behind the aspirations toward a self-effacing, submissive feminine ideal, and developing the independence that increasingly characterized the

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nineteenth-century’s representations of female characters.5 But even more reassuring are Spofford’s attempts to direct her youthful readership’s vision outward to the less familiar and unaccepted, both at home and abroad. In his discussion of otherness and difference in postcolonial theory, Shaobo Xie urges that “if difference has been violated and marginalized as inferior, then now it must be reinstated and recuperated as a counterhegemonic strategy, a way of mobilizing, activating discursive agency and energy” (1999: 8). In her Hester Stanley stories, Spofford engages in such strategy. While working within the confines of accepted attitudes and norms, steadily and consistently but almost imperceptibly, she broadens the spaces of culture beyond American borders, and she prompts her readers to broaden their attitudes and views. Spofford’s subtle subversions present and normalize alternative ways of thinking, being and reacting. If she transforms the alien other into more familiar form, she also pushes the mainstream world to accommodate difference and encourages her readers to find the richness that awaits in such recognition. Acknowledgment I wish to thank the University of New England’s Maine Women Writers Collection (MWWC) for facilitating my work on Spofford through its Research Support Program. Notes 1

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In addition to the studies mentioned in this chapter, for articles on individual Spofford works, see Amper (2001), Bode (2004), Dalke (1985), Ellis (2006), Fast (1994), Gaul (2002), Gold and Fick (1993), Holly (2001), Logan (2001), Marshall (1993), Opfermann (1997), and St. Armand (1983). In some ways, Spofford’s outlook seems close to Lydia Maria Child’s work in the Juvenile Miscellany, for both raise issues that threaten social norms but also often try to defuse social tensions. Speaking of the Miscellany, Karcher contends that “the contradiction between promulgating the moral, social, and political ideology of America’s white middle class and furthering a vision of racial equality that threatened white hegemony” did not “become apparent to either its editor or its audience until controversy over slavery polarized the country in the 1830s” (1995: 91). In contrast, Spofford seems readily aware of possible contradictions. See also Ellis who builds on Logan’s argument by focusing on the indeterminacy of Yone’s “racial signifiers” (2006: 267), and raising the possibility that the Asian imp may be a Willoughby relation. Hester’s motherless state is reminiscent of Topsy’s responses to Miss Ophelia’s questioning in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “’Who was your mother?’ ‘Never had none!’ said the child with another grin” (Stowe 1994: 209).

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Depictions of female independence include Phelps’ re-defining of the True Woman; the quiet, but determined rebellions of the female protagonists in the local color regionalists (Freeman’s Mother, for example); the emergence in the 1890s of the New Woman, among others.

Part III Sentimental and Realistic Constructs of Childhood

Figure P III: From the nineteenth-century children’s periodical Chatterbox (1884–99). Reproduced from Carol Belanger Grafton, Children: A Pictorial Archive from Nineteenth-Century Sources (NY: Dover, 1978).

Chapter Nine Robinson Crusoe and the Shaping of Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century America Shawn Thomson

In his 1836 review of the 1835 edition of Harper and Brothers’s Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Edgar Allan Poe elevates Robinson Crusoe as a model of heroic individualism in an era of entwined market expansionism and manifest destiny. Poe bemoans the newly imperialized and commercialized space of the nineteenth century: “Alas! the days of desolate islands are no more! There is positively not a square inch of new ground for any future Selkirk. Neither in the Indian, in the Pacific, nor in the Atlantic, has he a shadow of hope. The Southern Ocean has been incontinently ransacked, and in the North—Scoresby, Franklin, Parry, Ross, Ross & Co. have been little better than so many salt water Paul Prys” (p. 128). Through emphasizing Crusoe’s isolation on a desolate island, Poe recognizes the power of the illustrated Robinson Crusoe to create a distinct topos of male autonomy separate from the liberal, competitive marketplace and the domestic ideology of the home. The illustrated Robinson Crusoe functioned in nineteenth-century America to normalize the maturation process for young boys as they directed their adolescence toward greater expressions of independence. The image of Crusoe in goatskin waistcoat, breeches, and conical cap, and armed with a musket over each shoulder, was a widespread picture of manhood in the nineteenth century. As Crusoe stares away from the reader’s eyes, longing for reunion, the young boy who pores over this picture sees the ship stuck in the sand—the fateful shipwreck that leads to Crusoe’s isolation on the island—and a representation of Crusoe’s crude fortress of solitude—the structure emblematic of his woe and isolation upon his island of Despair. John Pine’s illustration of Robinson Crusoe for the novel’s first edition remained the most powerful and recognizable image of

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Figure 9.1: 1719 Frontispiece of Robinson Crusoe (John Pine engraving).

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this icon of masculinity even after hundreds of editions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This original frontispiece was “among the most enduring elements of Defoe’s original” because most editions reproduced it with little to no variation (Phillips 1997: 30). For boys who had mastered the novel, the frontispiece alone transported them to an uncharted space of hard-won struggles and demanding tests of character. In antebellum America, the iconic image of Robinson Crusoe alone on his island directed the energies of young men into the emergent marketplace and channeled sentiment toward the domestic relations of the home. Daniel Defoe’s hero represented the ethos of the self-made man and valorized the slow course of development from boyhood to manhood. For the middle class, the Crusoe story functioned to normalize the maturation process for young boys as they directed their adolescence toward greater expressions of autonomy and selfreliance. Yet in failing to achieve the heroic individualism of Crusoe, these same young men became alienated in a world that did not reward their inherent talents and heroic qualities. I argue that this failure to live out the Crusoe fantasy in an increasingly complex and ruthless sociopolitical world of postbellum America led to a residual feeling of melancholy that enabled men of achievement to occupy an insular emotional landscape separated from the actual suffering of those who lost out in the Jacksonian push to wealth and social ascendancy. In examining Robinson Crusoe as a structure of masculinity in the nineteenth century, this chapter aligns with several important critical explorations of the boyhood culture that emerged in the nineteenth century and developed into the twentieth century. In Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale, Kenneth Kidd identifies the “wild child” as representative of the “white middle-class male’s perilous passage from nature to culture, from bestiality to humanity, from homosocial pack life to individual self-reliance and heterosexual prowess” (2004: 7). In “Necessary Badness: Reconstructing Post-Bellum Boyhood Citizenships in Our Young Folks and The Story of a Bad Boy,” Lorinda B. Cohoon argues that these serialized novels of “bad boys” crossing the boundary line between the North and South participated “in the Reconstruction era’s hegemonic moves to maintain United States’ citizenship for white male citizens” (2004: 12). And in “Pandering in the Public Sphere: Masculinity and the Market in Horatio Alger,” Glenn Hendler examines how the literary market prepared young men to enter into the public sphere by “inscribing at the psychological level the political division between public and private” (1996: 418). These critics demonstrate the rise of these forms of masculinity from the postbellum to the modern era, whereas my interest in Robinson Crusoe as an underlying structure of masculinity is embedded in antebellum boyhood and transmuted by the realities of postbellum America. As an iconic image of manhood, Robinson Crusoe served as a nexus for the competing lessons of the home and imperious ambitions and newfound freedoms of Jacksonian America. Yet in the late nineteenth century, as David Leverenz states, “the corporate transformation shifted the locus of social value

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from individual male production to diverse varieties of consumer subject positions” (2003: 13). In this world of devalued individual achievement, the power of Crusoe’s rise from a poor castaway to the master of the island through a progressive series of discrete attainments no longer enabled young men to imagine their own elevation in an increasingly complex social hierarchy. Consequently, as writers such as Mark Twain and J. Ross Browne looked back across the Civil War upon their childhood, their readings of Robinson Crusoe shaped their view of antebellum boyhood as a golden age of embodied play and ennobling virtues. In his popular travel narrative Crusoe’s Island: A Ramble in the Footsteps of Alexander Selkirk (1864), J. Ross Browne describes his excursion by longboat from the ship Anteus to the island of Juan Fernandez in 1849. Robinson Crusoe had been one of Browne’s favorite books as a child. He describes the wonder of receiving an illustrated copy as a young boy and explores its meaning as a bridge between the fanciful childhood fairy tales he was beginning to outgrow and the rugged actuality of a concrete world in which he could act out his masculinist fantasies: I could not read in the dark, but I could open the magic book and smell the leaves fresh from the press; and before the type was visible I could trace out the figures in the prints, and gaze in breathless wonder upon the wild man in the goatskins. (p. 45) In the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, Browne traveled to gold mining California and the Apache country of Arizona; he sailed around Cape Horn and never outgrew the power of this iconic image. As Browne traces the imprint of John Pine’s frontispiece illustration, he enters through its crude woodblock lines into the day-to-day hardships of life as a castaway on a desert island. Browne’s bond to his illustrated Crusoe inspired him to follow in the famous mariner’s footsteps. Browne demonstrates the appeal of this book as both an immersive field of struggle and self-actualization and an adventure that channeled boyhood energy away from the comforts of the home into constructive models of selfreliance and self-determination. In Brander Matthews’s review of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in The Saturday Review, he notes the shared domain of masculine adventure of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Robinson Crusoe: “we have always thought the vision of the hand in the cave of Tom Sawyer is one of the very finest things in the literature of adventure since Robinson Crusoe first saw a single footprint in the sand of the seashore” (1885: 153). The reading of Robinson Crusoe as a set of individuated set pieces consolidated the middle class through a shared subjectivity. In the antebellum period, the tropes of Robinson Crusoe became signposts for the reading of the novel, directing the audience to the instructive lessons and emotional registers in service of a dominant ideology. Robinson Crusoe became a straw man for many readers who did not form a strong

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sympathetic bond with Crusoe’s struggle to gain self-mastery and play out the fantasy of the Crusoe story in the beaches or back woods. At the outset of Huckleberry Finn, Twain exploits the Crusoe fantasy of escape as Huck sets to “fooling along in the deep woods” (2004: 62). With a gun slung over his shoulder and buoyed by a sense of adventure, Huck enters Jackson’s Island with the enthusiasm of Crusoe setting out to the sea. With Huck’s encounter with Jim, Twain leaves the episodic structure of the boyhood realm of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for a more fluid narrative that merges personal growth with the blood and dust of America’s Civil War. Twain’s striking re-imagining of Crusoe within the context of antebellum boyhood infuses the archaic progress of Crusoe’s development with the complex moral dimension of Huck’s journey into the heart of the South. Robinson Crusoe provided a contradictory set of social norms and enthusiasms that guided the normative development of young men in the antebellum period. Defoe’s emphasis on Christian piety and the Puritan work ethic both gestured to the entrepreneurial spirit of the nineteenth century and shielded the home from the competitive ruthlessness and self-seeking manifestations of Jacksonian manhood. As a treasured object, illustrated Robinson Crusoe editions such as the Harper and Brothers’s edition with leather binding, gilded pages, and colorful illustrations became markers of the middle class and tools of instruction. The image of the heroic and melancholic Crusoe alone on his island served as both a model of piety and industry and an outlet for the pressure young men felt as they prepared to shoulder the burdens of adulthood, allowing children, as Gregory Eiselein describes youthful play in nineteenth-century adolescent literature, “to try on adult behavior, including preparing themselves for the world of work” (1996: 17). Yet Robinson Crusoe was also a threat to the sentimental family. The opening page of Robinson Crusoe equates manhood with leaving the home and looking to the horizon for masculine freedoms. In seeking this life of adventure, Crusoe consequently disobeys his father and points to his resulting “misery” as a warning for young boys who rebelled against the law of the father and ran off to sea. Yet in the face of an expansionist market, this act of wanderlust inspired young boys to cast off the feminine Christianity of the home and to seek out the life of the open air. In the literature of the antebellum period, numerous examples assert a direct connection between Crusoe’s act of going to sea as the inspiration for a young man’s restive energies and defiance of parental authority. Two examples from novels of the antebellum era represent the ways Crusoe’s irrepressible desire to leave home for the sea became an animating force in young men’s self-image. Jacob A. Hazen’s Five Years Before the Mast, or, Life in the Forecastle Aboard of a Whaler and Man-of-war (1854) describes going to sea as a normalizing expression of white manhood in the antebellum period: Whenever I made up my mind to go to a new place, I was up and off at once, without pausing to reason upon the advantages or disadvantages

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likely to result from the journey. I had now made up my mind to go to sea, and go to sea I would, Crusoe like, without any other object in view than the vague idea of hitting on some plan to make a fortune. (p. 19) As a tradesman at his bench, Hazen sees his workaday life as cut off from the masculine energies of the entrepreneurial adventurer. Crusoe does not represent the interior piety of a man driven to improve and actualize himself through labor, but rather the ambition to ascend in society set free of restraints and morality. Crusoe’s youthful impulse to go to sea represents an essential force in the formation of self. The open sea implies an identity in flux in a classless domain of competing masculine energies. This openness allows men to trade one identity for another to maximize their opportunity and to occupy an image of masculinity constructed to dominate a nonWestern society. By going to sea to seek his fortune, Crusoe serves as an outlet for masculine passions. Hawser Martingale’s novel Mark Rowland (1867) tells the story of a young boy who is spurred on to a life of adventure in the open air by his reading of Robinson Crusoe: Mark was always of an adventurous disposition, and from the time when he first read “Robinson Crusoe,” which one of his schoolfellows loaned him, he had cherished a longing for a roving life. That book has doubtless caused many noble, daring spirits to leave the comforts of home and the enjoyments of domestic life to seek out wild adventures and romantic incidents abroad. Besides, Mark did not anticipate any misfortunes. He looked, as youths are apt to look, on the sunny side of life, without seeing the storms and tornadoes, which are gathering in the distance. He figured to himself the delight of his mother when he should return from a voyage to a foreign land stout, hearty, and cheerful, and fling into her lap a pile of Spanish dollars. (pp. 12–13) Robinson Crusoe bolsters the desire to go to sea by creating an opposition between the feminine-controlled domestic space and the masculine freedoms of the sea. In this case, Mark runs from his mother’s side to go to sea. The boy’s hasty decision asserts his own masculine desire to see the world over his mother’s religious piety and domestic civility. Mark is acutely aware of the pain his leaving will bring to his mother, but his belief in his own untested heroism and innate powers drive him from his mother’s protection to attain his fortune. For young men like Mark, going to sea represents the ethos of the selfmade man. As Melville queries in the “Loomings” chapter of Moby-Dick, “Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea?” (1850: 5). Crusoe’s development as an autonomous and heroic individual through his mastery of the island was an animating model of self-actualization for young men setting out into the

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masculine sphere to seek adventure and fortune in the world. The home they left behind became a distant idea of feminine graces and moral codes of behavior. Only in returning home with gifts and tales of adventure does the nineteenthcentury man restore his place in the sentimental family. Robinson Crusoe locates a tension in the nineteenth century between the domestic ideology with its idealization of the child at the center of the family life and a boyhood with its own restive energies seeking out a terrain of free play. Furthermore, the captivating illustrations of Robinson Crusoe’s development from an impulsive young castaway on a desert island to “a monarch of all he surveyed” reinforced young men’s growing awareness of their own innate powers.1 In Dovecote, or, The Heart of the Homestead (1854), George Canning Hill looks back on his childhood, evoking the power of Crusoe in his boyhood fantasies of escape and autonomy: “We built grottoes, and constructed caves, and kept kittens for goats, when we could get them, and fairly picketed in our rude castle, as if fortifying it against a regular siege. I know not what the element is, in childish character, but it is certain that children love to play at nothing so much as solitude” (p. 143). In “playing Crusoe,” young boys re-imagine themselves as occupying a rugged masculine terrain cut off from the maternal support and moral guidance of the home. The fortress of solitude becomes an emblem of autonomy for young men acting out a real fantasy of emergent manhood. By following in Crusoe’s footsteps, nineteenth-century boys believed the challenges of claiming their plot of land and transforming it into an impenetrable fortress would manifest their inherent talents and heroic qualities. In “playing at solitude,” a boy imagines himself within a dichotomous construct of manhood as both a self-contained individual as a castaway alone on an island and an animating white male identity as a collective “we” under siege by some hostile external force. The power of this fortress of American solitude situates a locus of male sentiment and an ideology of white-centeredness that shields young men from the consensus ideology of Jacksonian expansionism. As young men moved out of the home, they sought out fraternal societies for the fellowship of the Crusoe fantasy and took on challenges to prove their mastery of self and the world. Yet young men who took their reading of Crusoe to heart became alienated in a world that failed to develop their talents and heroic qualities. Robinson Crusoe came to represent an archaic construction of manhood out of step with free market capitalism and imperialist ambitions. In Ups and Downs (1873), Edward Hale vividly demonstrates the middle class’s penchant for finding hard-won and applicable truths in the reading of novels. Horace, a young boy, has identified his own “sacred seven” novels that have contributed important life lessons to his development into a decent and industrious man: “‘Robinson Crusoe is one,’ said Horace. ‘I pity the man who is not more a man for that—there is the loyalty of friendship, and trust in the providence of God’” (p. 207). That Robinson Crusoe is the foremost of his

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top seven books indicates the novel’s staying power and cultural valence. As a castaway on a desert island, Crusoe is compelled to develop his own talents and improve himself, becoming, in Horace’s mind, a model of self-sufficiency and achievement. Horace and other bourgeois young men of the nineteenth century identified themselves as novel readers who could internalize the life lessons of Robinson Crusoe, inhabit its fantasy of an island removed from the world, and participate imaginatively in Crusoe’s pleasure in manipulating the moveable world. The “loyalty of friendship” of the Crusoe–Friday relationship represented both a model of true masculine friendship and the ameliorating force of white benevolence. The seemingly contradictory meanings contained in this trope illustrate how national manhood exploits ready-made structures that mitigate their power and represent an appearance of cohesion and unity. In The Word in Black and White, Dana Nelson explores how white people use metaphors of race to understand the world and “maintain the rationale behind their own dominance” (1992: 11). Robinson Crusoe plays a central role in defining a nascent national manhood that saw itself as isolated of necessity and that justified melancholy as a price for achievement. In Cato’s Tears, Julie Ellison roots this masculine sentiment of the nineteenth century in Adam Smith’s promotion of the neoclassical tradition of the Roman Stoic. His philosophy states that one does “not need to suffer from sympathy for those ‘out of the sphere of our activity,’ ‘those at the greatest distance’ from us, people who might as well inhabit ‘the world in the moon’” (1999: 11). Thus, the castaway figure in general and Robinson Crusoe in particular functioned to prepare young men for the isolating experience of their departure from the familial bonds of the home and the failure of peer relationships to create restorative links with the vital fantasy of selfmastery and male autonomy. Crusoe’s impulse to go to sea, leaving behind the “Life of Ease and Pleasure” (RC: 5), served as a catalyst for young men’s resistance to the home and inspiration for their own rise in the public sphere. As a possession, Robinson Crusoe is often described in the context of a boy’s library of books. In Curris Brandon’s novel David Woodburn, the Mountain Missionary (1865), Davie, the hero of the novel, has a library of “Goodrich’s History of the United States, The Life of Capt. John Smith, Weems’ Life of Washington, and Robinson Crusoe [sic]” (p. 170). The boy’s pride in his library suggests that Robinson Crusoe is subsumed within America’s ideology of heroic individualism. Davie places Robinson Crusoe next to the defining patriarchs of the nation: Captain John Smith of the Jamestown colony and George Washington as the great patriarch of the nation. At the end of the novel, Robinson Crusoe echoes Captain John Smith’s decree, “he who does not work shall not eat” (p. 64). In the formation of an American character, this law defines the connection between the self-made man and the progress and expansion of the nation. In recognizing the value of the productive worker to the health and strength of the fledgling colony, Smith fails to uphold British class rule.

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He does not shelter the aristocracy from the toil and deprivation of settlement, but treats all men as equals. Robinson Crusoe upholds this ethos of heroic individualism in his embodiment of progress, piety, and the Puritan work ethic. He claims possession of the island and establishes the colony through his years of labor and personal investment. While Robinson Crusoe delineates a citizenship contingent on nationbuilding, the book also presents a threat to the sentimental family. The limitations of mother-love to allow for male children to act out in the world remove them from the pressure to conform to the angelic and virtuous image of the child. In Silver Star, or, The Mystery of Fontelle Hall (1861), May Agnes Fleming’s description of a juvenile library depicts Robinson Crusoe as one of the approved books for children: “There was the Pilgrim’s Progress, Watt’s Hymns, the Melodies of Mother Goose, and Robinson Crusoe, with the beginning and end torn out” (p. 102). The books are either tools of religious instruction or a sanitized children’s literature. With the removal of “the beginning and end” of the copy of Robinson Crusoe, the censors of this novel separate the core story of Crusoe’s progress on the island and the didacticism of Crusoe’s life lessons from the liberal individualism of Crusoe’s leaving the home and establishing his Brazilian colony through the slave trade. Robinson Crusoe served as a mediator of these domains of Christian piety and masculine passions of the public sphere. Depictions of the consumed and digested Robinson Crusoe reveal the allure of a book of adventure for boys on a restricted diet of religious tracts and fairy tales. Robinson Crusoe offered a newfound sense of independence from feminine domesticity. As a masculine adventure in the open air, Robinson Crusoe stirred within young boys the impulse to experience manly freedoms in the backwoods. Yet the sympathy Crusoe evokes through his longing to return home endorses the power of mother-love and the codes of Christian conduct of the feminine sphere of influence. In the anonymously written Rubina (1864), the description of an “ink-besmeared, dog-eared copy of ‘Robinson Crusoe,’” exchanged from a girl to a boy who “grasped the coverless volume eagerly” (p. 101), reveals the allure of a new world of masculine adventure. The boy’s readiness to master the contents of the book in immersive and embodied readings signals his initiation into a manhood endorsed by a sphere of female sentiment. The illustrated Robinson Crusoe provided a collective immersion in an objectal world stripped of the feminine refinements of domestic civility and free of the tedious and rudimentary training of a professional life. In Mapping Men & Empire, Richard Phillips states, “the geography of Robinson Crusoe, deceitful and disturbing to readers of the eighteenth century, was realistic and normal to those of the nineteenth, when the story mapped, naturalized, and normalized conservative constructions of identity and geography” (1997: 27). The image of Crusoe dressed in his goatskin tunic and armed with his retinue of weaponry represented the free reign of boy pleasures and impulses—an embodiment of the authentic male stripped of pretentiousness and societal strictures.

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The symbol of Crusoe was important within the culture of young boys during this era. E. Anthony Rotundo describes boy culture as an age between six and the mid-teens when boys created a world “just beyond the reach of domesticity [that] gave them a space for expressive play and a sense of freedom from the women’s world” (1993: 19). Boys’ culture encouraged a mastery of nature. Boys would hunt, trap, and collect specimens and curiosities to display in makeshift curio cabinets. They established codes of loyalty and engaged in cruel games that forced boys to control their emotions or otherwise suffer the indignity of being labeled a “crybaby” and exiled from the inner circle. Furthermore, boy culture “required a boy to learn all these tasks independently—without the help of caring adults, with only limited assistance from other boys, and thus without any significant emotional support” (pp. 24–5). Robinson Crusoe conformed to the interior logic and impulses of boy culture and privileged collective readings of the novel that emphasized a yearning for autonomy and highlighted the appeal of hands-on engagement with the moveable world. The book served as the fertile ground of exciting arenas of competition and offered tests of physical and mental prowess. Consequently, as boys felt the increasing constraints of the mutual dependencies of the domestic sphere over their adventures outside the home, Robinson Crusoe became both the site and the source of conflict with the nurturing bonds of mother-love. Women recognized the power of this novel for inculcating their sons with its ideas of productive industry and self-restraint. During the Civil War, Robinson Crusoe became identified with home, boyhood, country, and Republican ideology. A January 8, 1862 editorial of The New York Herald states: Great praise is awarded, and more is due, to our noble hearted women for their efforts on behalf of the volunteers. . . . Who can read without emotion the contributions of the “Widow Barber” and her family – the cheese, the warm stockings, and the copy of “Robinson Crusoe.” May Heaven blessing and the grateful thanks of the volunteers be showered on the kind donors! This public sentiment places women in a supporting role to men’s public affairs and heroic actions. The Widow Barber is placed alongside the daughters of Benjamin Franklin for her patriotic act of sending donations to the Civil War soldiers. The editorial evokes the founding fathers, Franklin and Washington, situating Robinson Crusoe as a national text that embodies a will to action and moral steadfastness directed internally at the source of division and dissent. Young men saw the Civil War as a stage for individual heroism. It was the Widow Barber’s generation that sustained the mythic power of the founding fathers and impressed upon the young men their duty to uphold the ideals and institutions of the republic. In Embattled Courage (1987), Gerald F. Linderman speaks of the recruits of 1861–62 as men who came from families that dominated antebellum America socially, politically, and economically: “Those young men

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were white; were the possessors of basic schooling; were imbued with an American–Victorian morality; and, if not men of means, were confident of their ability to gain that status” (p. 2). In this context, Robinson Crusoe reinforces the home as central to instilling the guiding principles of middle-class culture. The character Robinson Crusoe embodies a blueprint for progress and serves as a moral compass in a time of misfortune and crisis. Even Crusoe’s acts of violence are controlled and purposeful; he never loses himself, nor does he forsake God. His violence betters his own life and achieves his goal of elevating himself from the barbarism and depravity of cannibal and mutineer, restoring his rank in the social hierarchy. The Widow Barber’s generosity is also significant for defining the power of women in the middle-class antebellum society. Women were shut out of the arena of national politics. As guardians of the home, women shaped the national character through shows of tenderness, the power of guilt, and the influence of moral suasion. Robinson Crusoe stressed these feminine influences: the Bible as a source for inspiration and moral guidance in daily life, the importance of domestic rituals in establishing a clean and respectable life, and a model of self-control and resolve when confronted by new temptations and pleasures. But primarily, women recognized the inherent power of Robinson Crusoe as a vessel of male sentiment that was as essential to young men’s identity as the physical sustenance of cheese and the comfort of “warm stockings.” Sending this book to the soldiers reaffirmed young men’s emotional exchange with the sentimental family and their place in the privileged position of the middle class in the cradle of the nation. In Glencoe Parsonage (1870), A. E. Porter demonstrates how the illustrated gift book Robinson Crusoe became a medium of exchange between the nurturing domain of mother-love and the construct of the Jacksonian self-made man. Bertha, the narrator, describes the angelic young Willie as a “gentle child” who receives his presents happily. The narrator’s “capacity for selfless renunciation of her desire” contrasts with the boy’s extroverted, dynamic, and embodied selfknowledge (Tompkins 1985: 125). The narrator’s sorrow for Willie’s inevitable loss of innocence becomes palpable before the looming emblems of manhood: There is Katie’s box of tools, Robinson Crusoe with illustrations, a dissected map from his father, and a pair of boots from mother. They are his first boots, I think this last present gives him the most pleasure. Who would think that a bit of calf-skin could fill a child’s head with such perfect satisfaction. Aye, it is one step onward to manhood. Children see the size, the strength, and feel the power of the man; but how ignorant of the toil, the responsibility, the temptations and the sorrow of the mature years! (Glencoe Parsonage: 77) While Bertha emphasizes the boots as the gift receiving the majority of the boy’s attention, the totality of these gifts provides an acute critique of the power

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of the illustrated Robinson Crusoe within the middle-class home. Through the toolbox, map, and boots, the family exerts pressure on Willie to manifest an imperial self through his child’s play. The meaning of these gifts and the recognition of the Crusoe as a model of manhood direct Willie’s energies into constructing an identity independent of the sentimental family. The illustrations of Crusoe’s progress and self-reliance on the island push Willie away from the instructive feminine Christianity of the home and into the liberal freedoms of the public sphere. The feminine narrator’s trite homily at the end of the passage only marginally suppresses her indictment against liberal individualism that directs young men into a world they are ill prepared to negotiate. The illustrated Robinson Crusoe served as a touchstone of the normative maturation of young boys in the nineteenth century who were expected to go off into the world to realize the requisite allotment of wealth and status to support a family of their own. In an anonymously written 1865 novel entitled Together, Ernest Heart’s attachment to his childhood illustrated Robinson Crusoe exemplifies the struggle of boys to carry the lessons of their boyhood reading into their encounters with the masculine space outside the home. As Ernest Heart gets older and defeated by the literary marketplace, his own unfinished manuscript is kept next to his worn copy of Robinson Crusoe that he treasures as “if the leaves were made of pure gold” (p. 164). For Ernest Heart, Robinson Crusoe served as an emblematic of his discovery of his own masculine agency, a part from the suffocating maternal influence of the home: He resolved long ago to grow up and be a big man and keep a large candy store, so that his pocket could always be supplied with smooth, sweet, shining sticks of lemon, wintergreen, peppermint, and molasses. That would be to him a future sugar paradise. Fourteen years ago to-day came “Robinson Crusoe”; then the sugar dream floated away out of his head; he would grow up to be a big man, and sail away and find that island and live on it, eat all those luscious fruits; he would dwell in that strange-house, half bower, half tabernacle, half palace, so secure, so sheltered. He read the book six times over; he was bewitched and fascinated, though no real love-story, or fair woman’s face, glows in all its marvelous pages. The next birthday he visited the menagerie, and resolved then, if he grew a big man, to be a hunter, and catch, and cage, and exhibit royal Bengal tigers—fifty of them—and he would find some way to tame them, so they would do something else beside march restlessly back and forth, as that one at Van Amburg’s did, in his ceaseless, dreary promenade up and down that narrow, cruel cage. (p. 108) Robinson Crusoe provides Ernest’s initiation into the masculine terrain of adventure literature that allows young boys to imagine an innate power to remake the world in their own self-image. Through the boy’s immersive reading of Robinson Crusoe, he gains a newfound sense of a manhood that cannot be

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contained by the candy store and its stock of lemon slices and sugary sweets but compels Ernest to go to sea. This passage presents the readerly conscience of a young boy as he transforms the text from a library of tropes and instructive morals to an individuated text that becomes a blueprint for Ernest’s masculinity and the foundation for a national manhood. Ernest embraces Robinson Crusoe as a world of adventure in which he can become a “big man” through display of his achievement and prowess. The fantasy of living on an island mirroring Crusoe’s independence is not acted upon outright but serves as the catalyst for the young boy’s masculinist and imperialist desire to hunt and capture Bengal tigers and profit by his conquests. Thus, Ernest takes hold of the progress of the Crusoe story and embodies the ideology of manifest destiny of the United States as it seeks to expand into new territories and annihilate or remove those who have a claim to the riches of the nation. Ernest is empowered by his newfound sense of male privilege in what the narrator describes as “a perfect gold-mine to his roving, ranging restless mind” (p. 109). In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Said points to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as emblematic of the power of the genre of the adventure novel to promote the sovereignty of the Western subject in foreign lands. Similarly, as America competes on the world stage for influence and trade, Robinson Crusoe becomes a mirror for a citizenship of white hegemonic power based on the domination of other, non-European subjects. Ernest’s fantasy of capturing tigers and showing them off in a way that is pleasing to the public emphasizes his control of nature and mastery of the objectal world. Playing Crusoe underlies an ideology of heroic individualism transmuted by the Jacksonian mission of building empire. The young boy’s desire to provide the public with a pleasing display of the iconic Bengal tigers has strong resonance with the southern ideologies of white paternalism and benevolence that whitewashed the reality of slavery to make it acceptable. Ernest’s “theory that no animal or human being lived that hadn’t one avenue of head or heart or instinct that kindness couldn’t reach” suggests this white benevolence as the vehicle by which lesser creatures are forced to submit to white power—a belief no doubt illustrated for him by Crusoe’s ameliorization of Friday (Together: 109). The portrayal of slaves in plantation literature as a family of “adored ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts,’ slaves who, the narrators insisted, were ‘like family’” confirmed the dominant culture’s view of blacks as a subhuman group separate from the universal humanity marked by whiteness (Ryan 2003: 72). The images of chained and whipped slaves elicited humanitarian outrage. Susan Ryan writes, “By the 1850s, a white northerner’s sympathy for a chained slave would have been informed by an abundance of visual images and verbal descriptions of slaves’ mistreatment” (p. 72). But those same depictions were countered by allegedly “real” scientific studies that demonstrated the slaves’ natural servitude (p. 70). Thus, Ernest’s display of tigers implicitly attempts to deflect these attitudes by remedying the display of captive tigers in solitary cages

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with natural environments that appease this same sympathetic response to the chained and suffering slave. In addition, the grouping of all fifty tigers in one display suggests the proslavery refutation of individuated profiles and narratives of slaves published by abolitionists in the antebellum period. The burgeoning market economy facilitated fantasies of mastery in an era of territorial and commercial expansionism. Robinson Crusoe becomes emblematic of a continuum of boyhood dreams of heroic grandeur and a realm of masculine adventure and male autonomy. This childhood fantasy of autonomy supports a nineteenth-century ideology of whiteness that imagined itself as asserting superiority and mastery over nature and lesser races. In this era in which young men sought out an escape from family life or provincial towns, going to sea became a call to action. In the novel Matrimonial Infelicities (1865), Barry Gray describes a young boy running away from home with his copy of Robinson Crusoe in his bundle: Early one morning he kissed [his sister] good-bye, while the stars still shone in the sky, and taking his little bundle, containing all his worldly possessions, including Shakespeare and “Robinson Crusoe,” he left the gloomy old parsonage and his grim father, and little Patience, and his dead mother lying in the churchyard behind him, and set off, with a bold heart but tearful eyes, upon his travels. (p. 241) With Robinson Crusoe as one of his treasured possessions, Master Gregory possesses a certain buoyancy of optimism as he sets off into the world. Robinson Crusoe affirms the boy’s decision to leave home and determine his own way in the world. Yet the presence of the book also serves to highlight the differences among the shifts in the bourgeois culture. Gregory does not read Robinson Crusoe as a testament of patriarchal authority but as a call to individual action against strict religious doctrine. Gregory recognizes the power of the nurturing feminine Christianity in visiting his mother’s grave, yet the description of the strained father–son bonds reveals a failure of the patriarchy to inculcate filial piety. As the father’s role in the home shifted from “disciplinarian to provider” (Leverenz 2003: 21), masculine passions were loosened from former controls and apparatus. The domestic ideology endorsed Robinson Crusoe as a tool of instruction that directed masculine energies from the home into the national enterprise. Robinson Crusoe served as a map to manhood and as a medium through which men could restore themselves within the sentimental family. It circumscribed a field of play that fostered an ethos of hard won achievements, instilled moral lessons, and encouraged male fellowship. Yet as young men left their homes to take their first job, go to sea, or travel West, they found Robinson Crusoe wholly inadequate preparation for the challenges of the competitive landscape of Jacksonian America. The proliferation of books published between 1828 and 1860 offering practical advice to young men demonstrates the failure of the

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middle class to prepare young men for the pitfalls of city life (p. 510). Ultimately, the object lessons of Crusoe’s progress on his island through his adherence to the Puritan work ethic and his belief in his God-given mastery over nature failed to negotiate the masculine freedoms of liberal individualism. As the life-lessons of Crusoe became discarded in the competitive marketplace of the nineteenth century, Robinson Crusoe could not control the push to wealth and status in the dynamism of antebellum America. Within the confined setting of the middle-class home, the illustrated Robinson Crusoe consisted of a set of stern lessons, registers of guilt and obedience, and digestible morals adults could imprint upon their children. Yet the attachment of young boys to the novel as a trusty friend and treasured object suggests the immersive quality of this text as an empowering text that directed boys away from provincial village life. In the hands of young boys, the novel both conformed to the antebellum notions of good citizenship but also encouraged an egotism that drove a wedge between duty to the family and the freedoms of the open air. The illustrated Robinson Crusoe served as a platform from which young men broke from the hold of the sentimental family and met the opportunities and blunt realities of Jacksonian America. Playing in solitude, young men identified with the depiction of the poor suffering Crusoe on the frontispiece of their edition and constructed a structure of masculinity contingent on isolation, suffering, and trial. Yet this very model of manhood, while counter to the circle of the home, pushed the ethos of the self-made man into new territories and erected the same boundaries of Victorian bourgeois life that men erected to shield the home from calamity and misfortune. Note 1

In the antebellum period, the famous line from William Cowper’s popular poem “The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk” came to represent an imperial power, representing property ownership and a foothold in the middle class.

Chapter Ten “The cleverest children’s book written here”: Elizabeth Stoddard’s Lolly Dinks’s Doings and the Subversion of Social Conventions Maria Holmgren Troy

More than one hundred years after her death in 1902, Elizabeth Stoddard finally seems to have received the recognition that she looked for during most of her adult life and that she most certainly deserves. In the past twenty years the first of her three novels, The Morgesons (1862), has reached a wider audience, while recent scholarly publications on most of Stoddard’s oeuvre—including her short stories and newspaper columns—indicate that her writing is beginning to take its rightful place in literary contexts, even though or perhaps rather because it upsets established categorizations of literary schools and periods.1 In all her writings, Stoddard challenges social and literary conventions. She shows little, if any, respect for prevailing religious discourses and the ethics of sentimentalism, and, unlike many of her contemporaries, she questions rather than reinforces the nineteenth-century ideals of domesticity and true womanhood. Moreover, in many instances, her style is humorous, quirky, elliptical, and experimental. In 1874, Stoddard published a children’s book, Lolly Dinks’s Doings, which has not yet received much critical attention, and which will be the focus of my discussion. Stoddard’s children’s book, her “last full-length project” (Mahoney 2004: 122), was published in the period directly following the Civil War, an era sometimes referred to as the “Golden Age of Children’s Literature” (Lundin 2004: 61). It was a period when many famous American authors wrote for children, when literature for children was reviewed by well-known authors in the most prestigious American periodicals, and when American children’s periodicals such as Our Young Folks, The Riverside Magazine for Young People,

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and St. Nicholas were highly regarded and read by both adults and children.2 In addition to the authors’ and reviewers’ aesthetic and economic concerns, American children’s literature was clearly a part of the postbellum national project, which had the acculturation of American children high on the agenda.3 Lolly Dinks’s Doings is a collection of tales that “appeared regularly throughout 1872 in The Aldine, a literary journal [Stoddard’s husband] Richard Stoddard edited from 1871–1875” (Mahoney 2004: 122). The narrative frame is the Dinks family with the mother as storyteller and writer and with the son, Lolly, as an active and unruly addressee. The chapters allow various occasions for storytelling and a diverse collection of stories and sketches with unusual content or twists of plot and dialogue. As Lynn Mahoney states in her brief presentation of this book, “Stoddard was quite proud of her Lolly Dinks pieces” and “[y]ears later she remembered Lolly Dinks’s Doings . . . as one of her best works. She described it as ‘the cleverest children’s book written [here]’”4 and cited a critic who thought that it was “equal to Alice in Wonderland” (p. 123). St. Nicholas’ editor Mary Mapes Dodge actually reviewed Lolly Dinks’s Doings; it was one of only 124 new books that she reviewed between 1873 and 1881 (Darling 1968: 214, 363). This is high praise, indeed, since Dodge defends the low number of books reviewed—and thus recommended by her to girls and boys—by stating in the first issue of this magazine, “It would be better to read no new books than to read too many of them” (“Books for Boys and Girls” 1873: 44). In contrast, the reviewer in The Nation (17 Dec. 1874) does not recommend Lolly Dinks’s Doings to young readers—on the contrary. Also Dodge is quick to point out that Lolly Dinks should “not to be imitated on any account,” but she does not expect a “model boy” from Stoddard, whom she describes as “one of the strongest and best American novelists, although she does not by any means confine herself to pleasant, heartsome incidents, and model men and women” (St. Nicholas 2 [Jan. 1875]: 190).5 In many ways, Lolly Dinks’s Doings confronts both social and narrative conventions as radically as Stoddard’s The Morgesons does. However, since her 1870s children’s book engages with central concerns in nineteenth-century American children’s literature, it also addresses a slightly different set of expectations, such as the role of the adult storyteller and the child addressee, and didacticism and moralizing vs. the free play of imagination in children’s literature. In what follows, I will suggest that Stoddard’s children’s book both participates in and challenges different trends and conventions in nineteenthcentury American society. Although both Cassandra Morgeson and Lolly Dinks are realistic child figures,6 there is a different conception of the child at play in Lolly Dinks’s Doings. In The Morgesons, which is set in the first half of the century, Stoddard subversively engages with Calvinist notions of “‘infant depravity’ and the inherent sinfulness of children, [and] Lockean conceptions of childhood as a ‘blank slate’ upon which parental authority must write” (Sánchez-Eppler 2005: xviii), which had influenced earlier American views of children and child-

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rearing, and to a certain extent still did. In Lolly Dinks’s Doings, Stoddard also draws on contemporary American Romantic ideas about the child that became increasingly important in the United States during the last third of the nineteenth century. This Romantic conception of the child is evident on the first page of the book: “Lolly Dinks is my son, six years old: he is continually doing something, and all his doings amaze me. Sometimes I call him Dinks, and sometimes Lolly. When he is naughty I do not call him by either name. A rod, a birch, smell as sweet (and sweeter to my friends who observe him), than the name of my sweet prickly rosebud, Lolly Dinks” (LDD: 5). In Romantic discourse, children were seen as closely related to nature and often celebrated by being compared to flowers (Heininger 1984:15). Moreover, in this passage, Stoddard also invokes the Romantic idea of the child as a subject in its own right, and Dodge highlights this trait in her review when she observes that Lolly Dinks “is simply his own startling little self.” In Childhood in Literature and Art: with Some Observations on Literature for Children (1894),7 Horace Scudder, the editor of The Riverside Magazine for Young People and later the editor of The Atlantic, comments on the development of the Romantic child. He states that “Wordsworth . . . was the first deliberately to conceive of childhood as a distinct, individual element of human life. . . . [to apprehend] the personality of childhood” (1894: 151), and that “it was the child as possessed by consciousness, as isolated, as disclosing a nature of independent action, thought, and feeling, that now came forward into the world’s view, and was added to the stock of the world’s literature, philosophy, and art” (p. 235). Mrs. Dinks’s comment about the rod smelling sweeter to her friends than Lolly Dinks’s name indicates that they subscribe to views of the child and child-rearing—which tally with Calvinist and Lockean views—that involve physical punishment in order to keep an imperfect, naughty child in line with social norms of behavior. In contrast, Mrs. Dinks’s initial response to Lolly Dinks’s independent “doings,” amazement, is Romantic: an attitude of awe and interest rather than of discipline and correction. Mrs. Dinks’s preoccupation with Lolly Dinks’s name in this first passage also introduces a feature of Stoddard’s book that it has in common with Alice in Wonderland: its awareness of and play with language. Lolly Dinks’s Doings contains the kind of play with language, “undercutting its transparency and ease,” that, as Jacqueline Rose has observed, has usually been “pushed to the outer limits of children’s writing” (1994: 40). Dodge and the reviewer in The Nation are not concerned with this characteristic of Stoddard’s book in their reviews, which supports Rose’s allegation. Another example of Stoddard’s undercutting the transparency of language is when Mrs. Dinks receives a letter from a friend, and it “warmed the cockles of my heart; though I could not, for the life of me, explain what those cockles were” (LDD: 113). In this instance, the idiomatic expression is defamiliarized, and language is shown as being far from transparent. With this and other strategies that we may call metafictional today, Stoddard subverts both realism and sentimentalism, since both approaches

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rely on language as a transparent medium that reflects the world as it is or should be and hide the extent to which language and those who control it create the world.8 Verbal behavior plays a large part when, after having been hurt by Lolly Dinks’s “crooked words that come out of his little coral lips” (LDD: 5) to the point of crying, Mrs. Dinks goes on to reflect on boys in chapter one of Lolly Dinks’s Doings: It seems to me that all other boys behave better than Lolly Dinks behaves. When they visit him, how meek and still they are! They say “If you please,” and “Thank you,” and, “Will you allow us to turn somersets on your bed?” and “Could you be so kind as to give us a drink?” They eat with their forks, while Lolly Dinks eats with his fingers. Their hair does not stick up all over their little respectable skulls as his does. He yells, “I wont eat bread and butter; I’ll only eat jelly;” and they say, “We had rather not eat bread and butter; we prefer jelly.” (LDD: 7–8) This passage, which compares Lolly Dinks’s behavior to that of other boys, brings up table manners and appearance, but is mostly devoted to verbal behavior. In the last sentence—although both the other boys and Lolly Dinks communicate that they want jelly instead of bread and butter—a polite, socially accepted verbal performance is juxtaposed with its opposite. The effect of this juxtaposition is comical rather than didactic, as it is placed after the boys’ polite request to “turn somersets” on Mrs. Dinks’s bed and her mention of their “little respectable skulls.” Mrs. Dinks’s invocation of her son before this rumination on boys—“Oh, naughty, darling Lolly Dinks!”—and her easy acquiescence to his request for a story directly after this passage are examples of the glorifying “mother-love” and “abandon” that the reviewers see in Mrs. Dinks’s relationship to her “lawless,” “ruffian” son. Stoddard’s book for children was published at a moment in the history of American children’s literature when boyhood was developing into a special realm outside adult social norms and restrictions. This development was connected to Romantic ideas about the unique and natural state of childhood, and it meant that boys, around six years old and older, were allowed, if not expected, to be naughty. Mary Heininger sees the “bad” or “mischievous” boy, in connection with the angelic child, as “another twist of sentimentalization” and points out that this image pertained to boys approximately reaching school age (1984: 26). In this context, critics often mention Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s autobiographical Story of a Bad Boy (1869)9 and Twain’s Tom Sawyer (1876), as important starting-points for a new genre in American children’s literature: “the boy book” (Clark 2003: 96). Beverly Clark states that “Key features of such books are that they imply middle-class norms, that they relate the boy to nature, adumbrating a pastoral idyll characterized by presexual innocence, and retreat from adult experience. They tend not to have linear plots

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but rather to be episodic: they do not depict the maturing of a boy so much as the state of boyhood” (p. 96). Stoddard’s book can be seen as a cutting-edge example of the boy book, as it is published before Twain’s Tom Sawyer and exhibits some of the key traits that Clark lists: it is episodic rather than linear, and it does not depict Lolly Dinks as a child who learns a lesson; it focuses on the state of boyhood rather than on growing up. In a telling episode in the second chapter of Lolly Dinks’s Doings, when mother and son spot a bear on the street outside their New York apartment, Mrs. Dinks tells a story about an enchanted prince who will be a bear until he sees “a Perfect Boy” (LDD: 22). Lolly Dinks is caught up in the story and contributes to the storytelling with questions and interjections, but pays no attention to its possible moral. After his mother has concluded that there is no perfect boy in their family, Lolly Dinks observes, “his face alive with that moral sensitiveness which characterizes him, as all must know who read these truths, ‘I guess the Perfect Boy for that bear is Barnum’s Fat Boy’” (p. 25). At this stage, Lolly Dinks obviously considers the perfect boy to belong to a circus or freak show. Nevertheless, in the last chapter, while he is away from home to gain some weight, his behavior “improves” miraculously. When he returns to his parents, “His deference and politeness for a couple of days was overpowering” (p. 115). However, this uncharacteristic behavior only lasts for two days and then disappears without a trace. This reversal highlights the irony of earlier comments in the chapter such as Mrs. Dinks’s claim that the Dinks miracle, her son’s sudden meekness, “has enabled [her] to give a mild finish to this important work” (p. 112), that is, Lolly Dinks’s Doings, and her ironic rhetorical question at the very beginning of the chapter: “was not my own small Dinks a great example for little boys?—especially for little boys who should keep fat, eat a great deal, and make no observations upon any thing; who, in fact, must never annoy their friends . . . and who must never bother anybody by inquiring into the nature of any object around them” (p. 108). It is clear that Lolly Dinks is a very poor example for this type of flabby, uninquisitive boy, and that the narrator’s sympathy is not invested in this kind of boy and the “shoulds” and “musts” that control his behavior. The setting of Lolly Dinks’s Doings is, however, different from the pastoral setting of the new boy book, exemplified by Aldrich’s and Twain’s books, which are set in the pastoral idyll of a small town. The location of the Dinks family’s home is the city,10 a location that was generally viewed with suspicion by many American writers of children’s fiction who preferred rural settings to the “dangerous, corrupting, and immoral” setting of the city (MacLeod 1975: 92; Lystad 1980: 89). Indeed, the environment that Lolly Dinks inhabits with his mother and father is a middle-class city apartment—at times animated with speaking insects and animals—with the bustling city right outside the window. Fancie, the fairy that Mrs. Dinks brings with her from a visit in the countryside in Massachusetts and keeps in the apartment over winter, is actually reluctant to leave the city’s “dust, cinders; [and] above all, the human-crowd smell” (LDD:

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80). In her treatment of the Dinks’s doings in their city home and when they visit the countryside, more or less as tourists, Stoddard draws a picture that on the whole can be recognized as a precursor of modern urban middle-class family life, that is, very different from the nostalgic pastoral settings of Aldrich’s and Twain’s boy books. Another aspect of the setting in Lolly Dinks’s Doings which has bearings on questions of gender is that it is domestic. A significant feature of nineteenthcentury American “boy culture,” as discussed by E. Anthony Rotundo, is precisely that it is set off from the domestic sphere and its regulations. He states that “at about age six, Northern boys cut loose from these social and physical restraints” (1990: 33). The restraints that Rotundo refers to here include items of clothing that restricted movement, usually associated with girls. But not only is Lolly Dinks mainly depicted in the domestic sphere, he also cross-dresses: in a letter to his parents in the last chapter he writes, “I wore Aunt Sade’s nite goun it had a train” (LDD: 113). In another chapter he asks why he cannot wear satin slippers: “‘I know I am a boy,’ said Lolly Dinks. ‘You have told me so often enough; but is that any reason why I should not have a pair of satin slippers, with blue rosettes and a gold ornament? How did you know that I was a boy when I was born? Ah, ah, Mrs. Mother, you did not know! Now, may I have the slippers to wear to Ally’s party?’” (p. 85). In his argumentation, with the objective to wear the same kind of slippers as those of his girl friend Ally, he questions any natural foundation for gender and sex categorization: he knows he is a boy because his mother has told him so, an utterance that humorously highlights the power of language to create rather than to represent reality. To Lolly Dinks, his mother’s decision to assign boyhood to him is purely arbitrary, although he acknowledges her control of language. The fact that he plays with a girl, and not only with boys, also shows that he does not belong to an exclusive boy culture. Nor are girls depicted as demure or very different from boys in Lolly Dinks’s Doings. The brief appearance of Ally presents her as “in a fluster of delight,” ready to respond in kind to Lolly Dinks’s statements (p. 87), and Fancie, the fairy, who sometimes functions as Mrs. Dinks’s interlocutor and as such replaces Lolly Dinks in parts of the book, is clearly unimpressed by him and boys in general: she “turned up her nose at the mention of a mere little boy” (p. 78). At one point, Fancie tells Mrs. Dinks about a boarding school in “this metropolitan Insectville,” that is, Mrs. Dinks’s room. Like quite a few of the tales in Stoddard’s book, this story parodies social behavior, here by enacting it with insects in the different roles: Miss Cockroach as the principal, Chirper Cricket as the music teacher, fifty Red Ants as boarding students, Fleas and Bugs as children of “an older class . . . our best families” (pp. 59–60). The Red Ants are taunted, verbally and physically, by the Fleas and Bugs of both sexes: “But the girl Bugs were the worst. They hid in the bottom of wine-glasses . . . and when the Red Ants went down there to play, the girl Bugs jumped upon them, and bit and kicked them till they were black and blue” (pp. 60–1). In this story,

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girls are naughtier than boys. Moreover, as she does in The Morgesons, Stoddard renders a very class-conscious American society, although in her children’s book it is shown in the interaction of speaking insects, animals, and plants of different kinds. Class is brought up in connection with the Dinks family and their servants, too. A case of what seems to be blatant othering in a class context follows one of Lolly Dinks’s comments at the dinner table: “Hereupon Alice, the waiter, gives a faint moan to hide a laugh; because, you know, little children, waiters must never laugh nor cry when they wait upon us. They are not beings, like us, you know; they are made of Stuff” (p. 111). The distinction that Mrs. Dinks makes between “us” and servants is definitely at cross-purposes with the “American principles” that the author of the essay “Books for Our Children” in The Atlantic, December 1865, expects and demands that children’s books should “illustrate . . . with all possible interest and power” (p. 730). American children, the author states, “should be trained in the belief that here the opportunities for education, labor, enterprise, freedom, influence, and prosperity are to be thrown open to all; . . . our children’s books . . . should aim to give respect to the genuine man more than to his accidents, and to rank character above circumstance” (“Books for Our Children”: 730). The prescriptive drift of this passage is echoed in Mrs. Dinks’s comment, but she says exactly the opposite: there is an essential difference between servants and those they serve. However, this passage in Lolly Dinks’s Doings is actually so foregrounded—in the use of italics and a capital S—in its being the only instance of direct address to children as external addressees, and in the repetition of “you know”—that the comment finally appears to be ironic. Thus, by parodying the rhetoric of a prescriptive didactic discourse, Stoddard exposes American social reality, where—in stark contrast to the “American principles” presented in The Atlantic—servants are looked down upon by the white middle-class people they serve; but she does it through rhetoric without actually challenging this middle-class privilege. Stoddard also discloses children’s literature as a commercial venture: Mrs. Dinks is very open about being a writer and selling Lolly Dinks material to a publisher.11 The whole process not only of writing, but also of publishing is brought up when Mrs. Dinks tells Lolly Dinks the first story: she explains that it is not much of a story and that “all the editors, and the publishers, and the readers, and everybody but Lolly Dinks, will see as I do” (p. 8). Rose observes that “The association of money and childhood is not a comfortable one” (p. 87), and “Perhaps talking about children’s fiction as commerce makes it too clear that we are dealing with an essentially adult trade” (p. 88). Disregarding what is socially comfortable, Stoddard makes no secret, in her children’s book, about children’s literature being an adult trade. As an object, Lolly Dinks offers resistance to Mrs. Dinks as mother and writer. The singularity of Lolly Dinks and his lack of transparency as a character undermine the conception of the child “as knowable in a direct and unmediated way” that Rose sees at the very heart of children’s literature (1994: 9). He is never

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totally contained and explained by his mother’s words. Even when she finds him asleep, “a picture,” he refuses to be purely an object of her love, fixed by her gaze and passively receiving her kisses; he talks back: “‘Don’t touch me,’ he murmured. ‘I am so comfortable. Don’t move the flower!’” (LDD: 40). Moreover, as listener or addressee, Lolly Dinks puts pressure on any assumption that it is easy to address children (Rose 1994: 1). He illustrates Bakhtin’s idea of the listener having as active a role as the speaker: the addressee as “partner-interlocutor” (p. 66). Lolly Dinks not only prompts his mother to tell him stories—“Tell me a story, and I will be good” (LDD: 7)—but has opinions about what kind of stories she should tell him, their content, and how they should be told: “make up something just like real life; only it must be all true fairy life—impossible things that ought to be, you know, my marmy. No more old stories like these in the bookcase” (pp. 26–7). His craving for novelty is remarkable, and he does not show any signs of the “joy of recognition” that presumably makes children appreciate traditional children’s books, such as classical fairy tales and other classics (Nikolajeva 1996: 54). So when Mrs. Dinks begins, “Lolly, once upon a time,” she is immediately interrupted by her son who shrieks “‘Mother!’ . . . ‘Once! You said that before.’” (LDD: 8). On another occasion, Lolly Dinks says: ‘Tell me a new story; not an old one you know.’ ‘Once there was a bear’— Lolly instantly shed tears. (p. 32) The reasons for his tears here are the offensive word “once” and the fact that Mrs. Dinks has told a story about a bear before. Lolly Dinks does not always suspend disbelief while he is listening to his mother’s stories and he is sometimes dissatisfied with the ending. When she tells him a story about a crocodile, he interrupts her when she mentions a sand-storm and claims, “There is no such thing as a sand-storm” (p. 12). The crocodile rather pointlessly dies at the end of the story, and Lolly Dinks inquires, “‘Is this all mother?’ . . . ‘I don’t believe a word of this story,’ cried Lolly Dinks. ‘It would have been different if the monkeys had been there’” (p. 15). So, Mrs. Dinks’s son has the last word about her story, which illustrates Julian Hawthorne’s assertion in his essay “Literature for Children” that “so far as my experience and information goes [sic], children are the most formidable literary critics in the world” (1887: 125–6). The context of Hawthorne’s statement about children as critics is a discussion of what he sees as the negative traits of children’s literature: among others, a tendency to talk down to children and moralize. Lolly Dinks’s Doings actually parodies and comments on what constituted a large part of American children’s literature in the nineteenth century: children’s books with a moral, didactic purpose. Lolly Dinks reacts very negatively to this kind of literature: “Many books are brought to Mr. Dinks for his instruction, of the sugar-coated pill-

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order of literature; but the sugar melts in his mouth, and out comes the pill” (LDD: 26). And although Mrs. Dinks sometimes shows her awareness of genre norms and even occasionally expresses a wish to “point a moral” and “adorn an example” (pp. 106–8), her attempts to do so are ineffectual. Lolly Dinks’s most serious objection to his mother’s storytelling occurs at the beginning of the last chapter, which directly refers back to the chapter that preceded it: “‘Now,’ cried Mr. Dinks, ‘that is utterly mean! Point a moral, and adorn a tale! It is a cheat. You have been talking good-boy-book to me, and it is very uncomfortable indeed. And now there is nothing for me to do, nothing to have, nothing to hear’” (p. 107).12 Here Lolly Dinks threatens to abandon his role as addressee because his mother has employed the rhetoric of didactic children’s books. He obviously considers this genre a personal insult, and his angry comments are not refuted by Mrs. Dinks, who starts questioning this narrative strategy: “Perhaps I could not point a moral, for these be parlous times for morals” (p. 107). Indeed, in the last chapter Mrs. Dinks equals her work, that is, Lolly Dinks’s Doings, to that of Lucretia P. Hale, who introduced an American version of nonsense in the absurd Peterkin family. Like Hale, Stoddard uses humor to undercut the domestic setting as a place for moral instruction. Stoddard also brings up the psychological and physical violence related to the moral and religious instruction of children. Lolly Dinks not only rejects, but is also disturbed by the moral and religious stories his mother reads to him: ‘Now, mother dear,’ he cries, ‘this book says, “For little dears who go to bed early, and make no fuss;” and every story you read me has an accident in it—makes me dream awful, awful, and holler, and be scared. I don’t want such books. This one says, “To little boys who never forget their prayers, and who are always thinking of what their parents wish them to do,” and there’s nothing in it but fights of the Israelites.’ (p. 26) The only incident in the book in which Mrs. Dinks actually resorts to violence and shakes Lolly Dinks is when he exclaims “Poo!” twice when she tells him to get his picture Bible: “I rise and shake my child, and, feeling the extreme sharpness of his shoulder-blades, am cut to the soul with remorse, as though with a penknife; but I go on with the shake, doing the business thoroughly” (p. 87). There is no indication that this action has any positive effects whatsoever on the son or the mother. Thus, in Lolly Dinks’s reactions to what the author of the 1865 essay “Books for Our Children” sees as an important part of “the juvenile treasures of all nations,” Judæa’s “sacred stories, that charm youth, as much as they edify maturity” (p. 725), Stoddard gives a different picture of the biblical stories’ meaning to children (“Poo!”) and what it can mean to mothers to try to enforce respect for these stories. In its questioning of the moral and didactic purpose of children’s literature and in its use of humor, Stoddard’s book can be seen as a part of a trend that, in December 1868, Putnam’s Magazine announced as “a new era in this country

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in the literature for children,” a move away from the “Sunday-school books” (p. 760).13 Stoddard’s Lolly Dinks’s Doings with its humorous play with language and social as well as narrative conventions, and with its peculiar fairy tales, may fit this category better than most nineteenth-century American books for children. Fairy tales were controversial in nineteenth-century America. Translations of the Grimms’ and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and Aesop’s fables were available in the United States, as well as in Britain, but many American authors and publishers regarded fairy tales with suspicion through most of the century (Avery 1994: 4). As Gillian Avery puts it, “They were held to belong to the past; they were irrational, unproductive, and irrelevant to modern needs” (p. 65). They were ungenteel and violent (p. 68). In contrast, Horace Scudder, the editor of the Riverside Magazine for Young People (1867–70), fought for the fairies and imagination,14 and he published Dream Children, a collection of his own fairy tales, in 1864, ten years before the publication of Lolly Dinks’s Doings. Both Scudder and Stoddard employ talking flowers and animals in their stories, and one of Scudder’s fairy tales in Dream Children is called “The Violet” (pp. 113–20).15 It features a newly married couple and talking flowers. The violet is “of good stock” (p. 116), and when the wife dies the violet is planted on her grave. The tone of the story is sentimental. Mrs. Dinks also tells a story about a talking violet.16 Like Scudder’s, Stoddard’s violet seems to be of good stock, since the family of weeds that grows in the neighborhood is mad at her because “she never noticed them” and therefore calls her “Viley” (LDD: 33). One moonlight night, Violet cries and indulges in her grief: ‘No father and no mother,’ she whimpered, ‘no brother nor sister, nothing to live for, nobody to please; surrounded by a lot of weeds, heartless ferns, for companions, and one cold toadstool!’ She looked at the latter, so upright in the moonlight, and an idea struck her: she would have a breakfast party of one in the morning; and the weeds should watch her while eating, and perhaps she might throw them a crumb. (p. 34) The rest of the story about Violet is mostly a dialogue between her and Major Mole about what she can have for breakfast, while he is digging up her root in order to eat it. The story ends with Violet dying, the weeds wondering if anybody will give her a funeral, and a robin pecking at her, “thinking her something to eat. That was the last of it” (p. 38). Unlike Scudder’s story about the violet, then, Stoddard’s story is far from sentimental in tone: it is characterized by humorous social parody that resonates with Cassandra’s observations in The Morgesons. Although Lolly Dinks’s conclusion that “Violet was foolish” (p. 39) may seem to be a possible moral of the story, none of the characters in the fairy tale appears to be good or even likeable: Violet is vain, snobbish and self-absorbed and hates flowers; the toadstool calls the weeds “upstarts” and is

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unwell because “some insect had eaten into his velvet ruffles” (pp. 33–4); the weeds are wilted at night and snore; they only look “respectable” in the morning and then they taunt Violet by calling her “Viley.” In the character Major Mole and his relation to Violet, Stoddard plays with the conventions of the seduction story, a popular genre among adult American readers during the eighteenth and nineteenth century represented by, for example, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple. Major Mole, the seducer, has a “smooth, furry voice” (p. 35). As Mrs. Dinks explains to Lolly Dinks, “He was a bad young Mole. His admiration for her made him want to eat her up!” (p. 36). After having bit off Violet’s root, the major trots off to his wife “without a look at the pale little being he had destroyed” (p. 38). Violet’s untimely death is characteristic of the seduction story. However, in combining the conventions of this genre with social parody, Stoddard manages to defuse or at least diffuse any unambiguous sympathy for Violet. Here as in all the other fairy tales in Stoddard’s book, the reader can also sense intertextual connections to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. In Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling,” for instance, there are passages that display the same kind of class-conscious social parody that we find in Lolly Dinks’s Doings: And the Cat was master of the house, and the Hen was the lady, and always said ‘We and the world!’ for she thought they were half the world, and by far the better half. The Duckling thought one might have a different opinion, but the Hen would not allow it. (Andersen 1881: 165) Stoddard refers to Andersen twice in Lolly Dinks’s Doings (LDD: 52, 112), and, apart from Lucretia Hale, he is the only contemporary writer who is mentioned by name in the book. In the last chapter, Mrs. Dinks gives credit to him as the only writer for children whose works surpass hers: “the recovered veteran, whose spirit will never die out of the memory of children—Hans Christian Andersen” (p. 112). That this statement about Andersen should not be read ironically is supported by Lolly Dinks sleeping with Andersen’s stories in his bed (p. 52), which vouches for their imaginative content and originality, since Lolly Dinks does not accept anything but imaginative and new stories. Scudder’s comments in Childhood in Literature and Art may provide some clues to why Elizabeth Stoddard, as a writer, appreciated Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. Scudder states, The use of speaking animals in story was no discovery of Andersen’s, and yet in the distinction between his wonder-story and the well-known fable lies an explanation of the charm which attaches to his work. . . . The fable is an animated proverb. The animals are made to act and speak

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in accordance with some intended lesson. . . . The lesson is first; the characters, created afterward, are, for the purposes of the teacher, disguised as animals; very little of the animal appears, but very much of the lesson. The art which invented the fable was a modest handmaid to morality. In Andersen’s stories, however, the spring is not in the didactic but in the imaginative. (1894: 210–11) In Lolly Dinks’s Doings, one of the speaking animals, a moth, complains about the tendency people have of “turning us to moral purposes, and making us tiresome metaphor” (LDD: 48). The moth maintains, “We are much like you human creatures, only we don’t compare ourselves continually with others” (p. 48). Thus, through the voice of one of her speaking animals, Stoddard makes the same point about the fable that Scudder makes in the passage above. Scudder also praises the “singular shrewdness” and humor of Andersen’s stories, which show that the writer is a “very keen observer of life” (1894: 212). The same could be said about the stories in and the writer of Lolly Dinks’s Doings. It is through humor, irony, and parody that Stoddard exposes class hierarchies that contradict American principles of social equality, and that she undercuts the sentimentalism that Romantic ideas of the child and childhood often entail—while, at the same time, she draws on these ideas in the characterization of Lolly Dinks and his relationship with his mother. Through metafictional strategies and her fairy tales, Stoddard also questions realism as the valid approach in American children’s literature. Moralizing and didacticism in children’s literature are explicitly challenged in the interaction between Mrs. Dinks and Lolly Dinks, and imagination and originality are promoted. Furthermore, Lolly Dinks emerges as an agent in his own right who successfully resists being totally defined and controlled by adult norms and definitions. In this, Lolly Dinks’s Doings can be seen as an early representative of the new American boy book, but with some significant differences. Far from the nostalgic rural setting of, for instance, Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Stoddard’s book is placed firmly in the urban present and indicates the future. Even more radically, her book subverts rather than reinforces traditional gender roles. To conclude, Lolly Dinks’s Doings can be seen as both a part of and a challenge to the postbellum national project, which included American children’s literature as an important part of the American youth’s acculturation; and it was probably, as its author asserted, the cleverest children’s book written in the United States for a very long time. Notes 1

See, for instance, Boyd (2004), Giovani (2003), Mahoney (2004), Smith and Weinauer (2003), and Opfermann and Roth’s (1997) edition of Stoddard’s Stories.

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See for example Clark (2003), Darling (1968), and Lundin (2004). In December 1865, the prestigious journal The Atlantic Monthly featured an essay, “Books for Our Children,” in which American children’s literature is seen as an integral part of the postbellum national project. The acculturation of American children is presented in distinctly war-like terms at the beginning of the essay, and the American child (cast as a male child) is explicitly paralleled with the rebellious but recently subdued South. Karen Sánchez-Eppler has recently suggested that “ideas about childhood and the innocent figure of the child [were] evoked in a wide range of cultural and political discourses in attempts to reform, direct, or influence the nation” (2005: xv), and this essay in The Atlantic gives an intriguing example of the dynamic interchange between and confluence of ideas and rhetoric about the nation, the child, and children’s literature. Richard Foster quotes Stoddard as follows: “the cleverest child’s book written here” (1971: xli), which is why I have inserted “here,” referring to the American context, in the quotation Mahoney gives, although I do not have access to the original source. Both reviews focus on the characteristics of Lolly Dinks—“naughty darling,” “sweet little ruffian,” “the audacity and lawlessness of Lolly Dinks” —and his mother’s attitude to him: his being “glorified by mother-love,” which exposes “the brilliant foolishness and abandon of his mamma.” In their focus on the mother–child relation, Dodge and the reviewer in The Nation may have attempted to normalize the form and content of Stoddard’s book. The reviews do not mention the content or style of the stories, some of which include fairies and speaking animals and flowers. Nor do they mention Mrs. Dinks’s occupation as a writer of children’s literature. In a private letter to Elizabeth Stoddard, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: “I was particularly impressed with the childhood of the heroine in The Morgessons [sic], and the whole of the first part of the book. It seemed to me as genuine and lifelike as anything that pen and ink can do” (Matlack 1977: 278). The essays in this collection “were first delivered as Lowell Institute lectures in 1882, then published in the Atlantic in 1885, and finally gathered in a book” (Clark 2003: 54). Cf. Rose, who points out that what a “realist” aesthetic in children’s literature “denies . . . is language—the fact that language does not simply reflect the world but is active in its constitution of the world. And this rejection of language as process, its activity, means that what is also being refused is this idea that there is someone present inside the utterance, ordering it, or disordering it, as the case may be” (1994: 60). For an enlightening discussion of Aldrich’s Story of a Bad Boy in the context of postbellum American citizenship, see Lorinda Cohoon’s “Necessary Badness” (2004).

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To be sure, in depicting a family, Stoddard’s book is hardly unusual, joining the majority of American children’s books published between 1836 and 1875. The institution of the family was then referred to in books for children almost as frequently as religion, which was the most prominent concern of most children’s books during this period (Lystad 1980: 95–7). In the 1880s, Scudder sees in children’s literature “the most flagrant illustration of that spurious individuality in childhood which I have maintained to be conspicuous in our country. Any one who has been compelled to make the acquaintance of this literature must have observed how very little parents and guardians figure in it, and how completely children are separated from their elders” (1894: 239). The American children’s literature that Scudder refers to here might be “dime novels” and rags-to-riches stories that had first become popular in the 1860s (MacLeod 1975: 149). These references also contribute to the metafictional aspects of the book. Alison Lurie points out that Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer “in irritable reaction against what Twain described as ‘goody-goody boys’ books’— the improving tales that were distributed in tremendous numbers by religious and educational institutions in nineteenth-century America” (1990: 4). Putnam’s announcement of the new era in children’s literature is made in a review of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. The reviewer is either the Stoddards’ friend Edmund C. Stedman or Richard Henry Stoddard himself (Darling 1968: 118). Horace Scudder was behind the boost of American interest in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales in the 1860s: he persuaded Andersen to contribute to the Riverside Magazine for Young People (Westergaard 1949:7; Avery 1994: 4), and many of Andersen’s stories written in the late 1860s were actually first published there (Hersholt in Westergaard 1949: vii). In the mid-nineteenth century, talking flowers actually figured prominently in books by two American women writers who are associated with Transcendentalism: Mary Peabody Mann published her book for young adults, The Flower People, in 1846, and Louisa May Alcott her Flower Fables in 1855. For a recent discussion of Mann’s book see Patricia M. Ard’s “Transcendentalism for Children” (2006). Both Mann and Alcott seem to have had more didactic and moral objectives—although certainly different from those of the Sunday-school books (with their talking flowers) than Stoddard had with hers. Stoddard’s story about the Violet appears to be built on William Wordsworth’s poem “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” in Lyrical Ballads. Mrs. Dinks begins her story “A violet grew by a mossy stone [. . .]”

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(LDD: 32), and the second stanza of Wordsworth’s poem begins “A violet by a mossy stone.” The maiden in the poem receives no praise, has very few to love, and dies at the end of the poem, just like Stoddard’s Violet.

Chapter Eleven A Sentimental Childhood: The Unlikely Memoirs of Realist-Era Writers Melanie Dawson

One of the common critiques launched against Zitkala-S
a’s autobiographical stories of her Indian childhood is that they evince a sentimentality that has been viewed as a capitulation to popular influences. Because of her emphasis on familial relationships, her tribal community, and the tears attending her various cultural realignments during a long and arduous process of cultural reorientation, Zitkala-S
a’s work has been read as both inauthentic for a Native author and, in somewhat more vague terms, inappropriate for a realist-era writer. These charges stem from the notion that the deep feeling Zitkala-S
a attributes to her childhood—and the rupture out of it—constitute troubling flaws. Jane Hafen comments that Ztikala-S
a’s writings “reflect various cultural trends of her day,” including a “popular sentimentality,” viewing this tendency as distinctly negative (1997: 31). Similarly, Laura Wexler examines sentimental “indoctrination” (2000: 126) in texts and nineteenth-century photographic practices, discussing Zitkala-S
a as an example of “the dominant culture’s successful appeal to the sentimental reflex” (p. 125). According to Wexler, by the time Zitkala-S
a composed her autobiographical stories, her “self conception had been so effectively ensnared within the codes of sentiment that there is nothing Native American in them that’s untouched by Western representations” (pp. 120–1). Infiltrating such comments is evidence of expectations about another, unspoken set of norms connected to the fin-de-siècle marketplace, or realistic paradigms, which have so often been positioned as oppositional to sentimentality. Yet among realist memoirists, Zitkala-S
a was no more sentimental than other turn-of-the-century writers who looked back on their childhoods, authors from a range of ethnic, economic, and regional backgrounds. Across the memoirs of authors as diverse as Henry James and Zitkala-S
a, W.D. Howells

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and Lucy Larcom, a sentimental portrait of childhood emerges as a trend as marked as it is out of sync with realist tendencies toward dispassion. This trend, hence, raises pointed questions. Can we view a sentimental childhood as a universal inscription? As a product of an emerging understanding of child development? Although explanations of cross-cultural and developmental attitudes appear plausible, there is an additional dimension of this trend that emerges as most compelling: the authors’ departures from realist paradigms, otherwise embraced in full or in part by the authors I discuss here. Why an author’s narration of a personal past—assessed in what are often the terms of a historical shift of an emergent modernity—should emerge through the premodern terms of the sentimental narrative appears as a choice raising multiple questions: why this construction of youth, and why in particular for authors of this period, who are best known for their emphasis on epistemological observation and an attention to the minutia of specific processes? There would seem to be a profound dissonance between the realists’ evolving practice of representation and their consistent, idealizing portrayals of an emotionally defined childhood. With childhood defined as emotional and familial, as dominated by the immediate maintenance of deep, interconnective bonds, it appears reminiscent of what Cindy Weinstein describes as a typical sentimental plot featuring “the breaking apart of the biological family” and the child’s introduction into a world “of strangers” (2004: 105). Although, as Weinstein notes, strangers may form a set of new (and even preferable) bonds with children, it is the biological family’s dissolution that generates a sentimental narrative. This plot of the imperiled family appears throughout late nineteenth-century memoirs, but so too does the devastating narrative of the lost child self, a beloved child self indissolubly linked to the age before modernity. Lucy Larcom would write, for example, “my feet often go back and press, in memory, its grass-grown borders, and in delight and liberty I am a child again” (1986: 36). To reimagine herself as a child, she necessarily recognizes that there were “narrow limits [that] were once my whole known world” and a “delight” in this narrowness. And yet, as an adult narrator, she must see that her childhood was “but the beginning of a road which must lengthen and widen beneath my feet forever” (p. 36). With their idealized, pastoral, familial spaces, memoirs otherwise unalike in so many ways commonly invoke a vision of a sincere and emotionally bound childhood reminiscent of portrayals of children appearing a half-century earlier in the sentimental novel, communicating what June Howard describes as sentimental literature’s goal in rendering emotion “sincere” (p. 218). Part of my interest in these memoirs lies in recuperating affect as part of a realist-era sensibility—but not as a retrograde tendency (as Ann Douglas describes it), nor as a by-product of romantic narratives (as Suzanne Clark has argued). Rather, sentimental strains in turn-of-the-century memoirs appear as one valence in a set of stylistic variations with which the realists experimented. Investing the past with both personal and collective feeling, in the end, required

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a sentimental voice that belies the very modernity that these authors chart, countering progress with the values of antiquated feeling. Sentimental moments also help define a confluence between modernity and realism. What results is a pronounced belief that childhood becomes a locus of emotion because it encompassed pre-modern values, even as childhood appears as an idealized, if profoundly limited emotional stage in the life trajectory of the emergent moderns. As mid-to-late nineteenth-century children, both Caucasian and Native, left small villages for larger cities, a pastoral existence became increasingly distant for an entire generation of adolescents and young adults; the model of a rural, familial, and at times, a desultory childhood appears as a pointed historical emblem, an homage to a pre-industrial experience.1 Encompassing both disorientation and the familial bonds of affection experienced by the child, these narratives do more than suggest mainstream literary pressures, as some scholars have suggested of sentimental paradigms. We might instead view these texts’ attention to the child’s emotional experience in the context of the difficult and disorienting experiences of encountering modernization—on both personal levels (leaving individual homes and families) and in broader ones (witnessing the dissolution of agrarian lifestyles). As Nancy Cott has written of Larcom’s memoir, A New England Girlhood (1889), it “captures a poignant moment in the transition from rural to industrial society and the type of character that made that transition” (p. xi). To a generation born in rural environments, who lived their professional, literary lives in large industrial cities, the period of early youth must have looked remarkably straightforward and refreshingly simple. The historical moment, in other words, predisposed authors to a sentimental representation at odds with the literary forms most congruent with an emerging modernity, including realism. This narrative of an emotional childhood also forms the prelude to a more extended story of an individual’s development into a state of affective complication and irresolution. Thus an attention to a sentimental childhood underscores an interest in psychological development out of an emotionally saturated stage of life. Zitkala-S
a’s narrative highlights the importance of the emotional bonds she experienced in her youth on the Yankton Sioux reservation on the mid-western plains. As she describes her early participation in an extended community, she stresses the dignity of relations among all generations; she is bound inextricably to adults, with intergenerational ties of kinship emerging as the simplest, most visceral of bonds. Her elders figure prominently in her childhood consciousness as she sits, waiting for the time when “old legends were told” around the fire (“Impressions”: 71). One section of “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” (1900) relates a story of going through the motions of making coffee for an elder, who, with great dignity, drinks the used coffee grinds mixed with the “warm Missouri River water” she presents (p. 78). Yet, she notes, despite her “insipid hospitality,” neither the elder nor her mother, who returned shortly, “said anything to embarrass me. They treated my judgment, poor as it was, with the

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utmost respect” (p. 79). For hostess and guest alike, the “law of our custom,” as she terms it, compelled both to dignity (p. 79). Zitkala-S
a’s memoir becomes most pointedly affective in its representation of the author before she left the reservation for a mainstream education. In a sense, the emotional security of her childhood ends with the moment in 1884 when she, as a seven-year-old, insists upon being taken from her mother and educated by missionaries in a Quaker school, a manual labor institute. When she describes herself as a “wild child” on the plains, Zitkala-S
a’s work, in fact, most resembles other sentimental narratives of childhood, not because of the visible romanticization of the child, but because of the feeling projected onto the child, who is “clad in a slip of brown buckskin, and light footed in a pair of soft moccasins . . . free as the wind that blew my hair, and no less spirited than a bounding deer. These were my mother’s pride—my wild freedom and overflowing spirit” (p. 68). At such moments, the narrative of early childhood is rooted in the depiction of parental “pride” and affection, which the narrator then seconds. As her mother predicted, Zitkala-S
a would “suffer keenly” in the “experiment” of acculturating Native children (p. 86); “herded” like a small animal, Zitkala-S
a was subjected to an infantilization meant to reveal her inferior status as a savage (“School-Days”: 91). That her customary sense of dignity and selfcontrol would be challenged in this process becomes clear at the moment of her arrival at the school; although confused, the child is “tossed high in midair” by a “paleface woman,” all the while knowing that “my mother had never made a plaything of her wee daughter” (p. 88). As a consequence, she mourns the loss of the individualized self she was encouraged to develop within her tribe. She had been “keenly alive,” she explains, “to the fire within,” or her sense of personhood in tandem with the land and community (“Impressions”: 69). After her education, when Zitkala-S
a recognizes herself as a potential source of pain to her family and community—not just delight—her narrative loses its sentimental child. In contrast to the beloved “wild girl” possessed of a clear and relational sense of identity (“School-Days”: 97), she begins to view herself as a source of her mother’s pain. Whereas she initially saw her family’s distress as focused on the “palefaces” who brought about the deaths of a beloved uncle and sister on the “trail of tears,” upon her return trip home she becomes conscious of what Dexter Fisher describes as “the conflict between tradition and acculturation [that] was to plague her throughout her life” (1979: ix). After finding no comfort in the Bible her mother offers her, the young adolescent hears a “loud cry piercing the night” and realizes, “It was my mother’s voice wailing among the barren hills which held the bones of buried warriors. She called aloud for her brothers’ spirits to support her in her helpless misery. My fingers grew icy cold, as I realized that my unrestrained tears had betrayed my suffering to her, and she was grieving for me” (“School-Days”: 100). The daughter’s surprise at her mother’s tears, proof of her mother’s participation in her misery, overlaps with a changed self-regard. Whereas she previously viewed herself solely as a

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lovable child, she views her adolescent self as involved in fractured, difficult, and unresolvable relations, both because of her schooling and through an awakening adult consciousness. While many of the most compelling parts of Zitkala-S
a’s narrative are those that confront the difficulties of her maturation, she is able to depict herself as a sentimental figure because she, like her mother, can embrace that child most easily—the child who caused no pain, the figure antedating the difficult patterns of adulthood, which demand a different, more self-conscious narrative. As comparable passages from Lucy Larcom’s A New England Girlhood (1889) reveal, narratives may demonstrate affection for a narrator’s former self, while setting clear conditions on this affection. Larcom’s sentimental strains, like Zitkala-S
a’s are reserved for her earliest years, as in the following passage: I can see very distinctly the child that I was, and I know how the world looked to her, far off as she is now. She seems to me like my little sister, at play in a garden where I can at any time return and find her. I have enjoyed bringing her back, and letting her tell her story, almost as if she were somebody else. I like her better than I did when I was really a child, and I hope never to part company with her. I do not feel so much satisfaction in the older girl who comes between her and me, although she, too, is enough like me to be my sister, or even the girl is the mother of the woman. But I have to acknowledge her faults and mistakes as her own, while I sometimes feel like reproving her severely for her carelessly performed tasks, her habit of lapsing into listless reveries, her cowardly shrinking from responsibility and vigorous endeavor, and many other faults that I have inherited from her. (p. 12) The division Larcom marks appears as a developmental divide between childhood and adolescence, and she evinces less affection for the young adult, who is faulty and careless, listless, and cowardly. Now that the youth is expected to be enterprising and practical, Larcom issues a clear judgment against this “older girl.” But for the embraceable, uneconomic child, Larcom articulates greater satisfaction, as if she loves her child self best. In such moments, Larcom’s sentimentality emerges as a byproduct of narrating the fall from a simple childhood to a complicated, industrial experience, which entails working in the Lowell textile mills. For Larcom, as for other period authors, childhood should not be understood as a nostalgic object, but instead, as a sign of authors’ investment in a trajectory of modernity informed both by child psychology (which rose in importance around 1900) and by the realities of industrial participation.2 In this trajectory, childhood appears as a psychologically straightforward phase of life rather than an encapsulation of life-long character; the text’s allusion to a developmental trajectory, I would argue, inscribes turn-ofthe-century sentimentality as unique from the articulation of sentiment at, say, 1860, for here the domestic, sincere child is on her path to a disruptive period

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of adolescence, the difficulties of that fraught age in no way linked to lasting personal flaws.3 Rather, the vanishing of the child self constitutes a narrative couched in an unusually emotional set of terms, just as the emergence of the adolescent demands a more qualified narrative valence. Throughout Larcom’s narrative, like that of other memoirists, sentimental moments alternate with realist descriptions, which appear in accounts of the “primitive ways of doing things,” which, Larcom writes, “had not wholly ceased during my childhood” and which included tallow candles and oil lamps, and cooking over open fireplaces (p. 21). Addressing the encroaching influences of industrialization, Larcom enacts a cultural preservationism through detail as her appreciation for the “primitive” ways of her childhood becomes inseparable from her sense of domestic security. “Cooking-stoves were coming into fashion,” she writes, “but they were clumsy affairs, and our elders thought that no cooking could be quite so nice as that which was done by an open fire. We younger ones reveled in the warm, beautiful glow, that we look back to as to a remembered sunset. There is no such home-splendor now” (p. 28). Larcom’s description of her homespun toys reiterates her argument that the old ways are most conductive to the simplicity of an ideal childhood, as she recalls her “rag-children—absurd creatures of my own invention, limbless and destitute of features” (p. 29). These were the toys that she loved, she contends, “far better than I did the London doll that lay in waxen state in an upper drawer at home” (p. 29). The ideal experience, for Larcom, is markedly pre-industrial, prompting the comment that “No dream of a railroad had then come to the quiet old town” (p. 33). Larcom’s narrative style changes abruptly, however, with her portrait of adolescence, which is aligned with references to labor, city living, and economic as well as social anxieties, resulting in less attention to the affection and “home-splendor” of her fond descriptions. After her father’s death, Larcom’s mother purchased a boarding house in the Lowell Mills area, and the family left the seaside town of Beverly, Massachusetts. At the age of eleven, Larcom began working in the mills, for her mother, as she noted, “could never learn to economize” and was not profiting from the boarding house (p. 152). The family’s relocation produces a markedly anxious narrative, which encompasses laboring hours, friends in the factory, and Larcom’s thwarted educational ambitions. Throughout, it is clear that modernity’s effects upon family life become intertwined with an unfulfilling adolescence, articulated through a realistic narrative. At one point, Larcom is allowed to attend school after a year’s work in the mills, and she discovers her intellectual potential, but also finds that “The little money I could earn—a dollar a week, besides the price of my board—was needed in the family, and I must return to the mill” (p. 155). In addition, she details her interactions with the other Lowell “girls,” as well as her composition of poetry during her shifts.4 Interwoven with these experiences, a narrative of defrauded childhood emerges, as when she notes, “I felt like a child, but considered it my duty to think and behave like a woman” (p. 166). At times,

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Larcom assures the reader (and perhaps herself as well) that “Childhood . . . is not easily defrauded of its birthright . . . At home I was among children of my own age . . . We had our evening frolics and entertainments together, and we always made the most of our brief holiday hours” (p. 167). Larcom’s narrative thus resonates with ideals shared by turn-of-the-century memoirists: the sanctity of the biological family, the right to play, the secluded pastoral spaces “naturally” inhabited by youth. “It was a pity,” she writes “that we were expected to begin thinking upon hard subjects so soon, and it was also a pity that we were set to hard work while so young. Yet these were both inevitable results of circumstances then existing; and perhaps the two belong together. Perhaps habits of conscientious work induce thought. Certainly, right thinking naturally impels people to work” (p. 9). In such reflections, the realist and idealist meet. For Larcom, the sentimental vision of childhood sets up an examination of the incomplete emotionality of life thereafter. Such a paradigm, moreover, suggests that part of what rendered realist writing believable was its interest in documenting partial, qualified, incomplete feeling—and a self-conscious, cognitive interrogation of affect’s complexities. By contrast, sentimental moments allowed for a fuller experience and articulation of feeling, but without the attending self-consciousness of any troubling incompleteness. Such memoirs suggest that the invocation of a sentimental childhood becomes a point of tension for authors who worked within the dominant literary expectations aligned with realism. The main proponents of realist literary production were, of course, Howells and James; Zitkala-S
a also published in the most prominent of realist vehicles, The Atlantic Monthly. Larcom, a poet, also acted as assistant editor of Our Young Folks; realist description, however, forms a distinctive element of her memoir’s portrait of industrial labor at the Lowell Mills textile factories. Across these works, a sentimental vision of childhood appears as a decisive representational portrait precisely because of its challenges to notions of objective distance, which have a visible role within the same texts. What was important about childhood, however, could not be rendered within the representational limits of realist paradigms. Rather than abandoning realism, these authors clarified their subject matter with respect to the child as the locus of pure and unfiltered feeling, even as each author’s complete sense of self (shifting and fluctuating across time) eludes stock characterization. For them, the vehicle that took on a specific and limited sentimental function, the affective child, grows up and inhabits a modern world (rather than ascends to Heaven, for example). Additionally, sentimentality does not correspond with the visceral immediacy of corporal pain, as has been argued of mid-century sentimental narratives. 5 Rather, these later narratives preserve their strongest ties to realist paradigms through the child’s gradual and necessarily difficult maturation. Thus Howells’s or James’s or Zitkala-S
a’s sentimentality operates in a peculiarly modern way; an initial innocence of feeling is experienced not merely by the morally upright or exceptionally spiritual, but by a broad, economically diverse, cross-cultural, and self-consciously

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maturing population of emergent moderns, for whom realism becomes the mode of expressing a compelling and complex adult consciousness in the making. Yet the sentimental relations of early youth instill narratives with an undergirding sense of humanity, positioned as essential to a generation that would witness and partake in the uncertainties of dislocation and fractured family structures. Howells’s memoir, A Boy’s Town (1890), serialized in Harper’s Young People, for example, begins with the stability of his early life in Hamilton, Ohio, a “little coal-smoky town on the banks of the Ohio,” and details his life to age of eleven, when his family moved further north in order to pursue lucrative employment, including work for young William (p. 715).6 Howells’s narratorial satisfaction with childhood stems from a combination of pastoral setting, familial relations, and his sense of himself as nurtured and protected. That Howells presents an ideal locale for a boy is without question when he asserts: It seems to me that my Boy’s Town was a town peculiarly adapted for a boy to be a boy in. It had a river, the great Miami River, which was as blue as the sky when it was not as yellow as gold; and it had another river, called the Old River, which was the Miami’s former channel, and which held an island in its sluggish look; the boys called it The Island; and it must have been about the size of Australia; perhaps it was not so large. (p. 711) Combining the exaggerations of youth (“it must have been about the size of Australia”) with a measure of mature restraint (“perhaps it was not so large”), Howells inscribes his childhood as a definable psychological state as much as it is the setting of typicality, which is to say, his childhood experiences are notable not because of “exciting adventures or thread-bare escapes,” but in light of “daily doings and dreamings” (p. 711). Typically eschewing the melodramas of early youth, Howells enacts a realistic investment in everyday experiences. Another sign of Howells’s realist frame remerges in his peculiar self-referencing. “For convenience,” Howells writes, “I shall call this boy, my boy; but I hope he might have been almost anybody’s boy; and I mean him sometimes for a boy in general, as well as a boy in particular” (p. 711). Howells’s treatment of himself as both an individual and a type suggests, foremost, his effort to cleave to the tone and attitude of an analytical realist who faces a subject that frequently tempts him beyond narrative restraint. And yet, the phrase “my boy” takes on a distinctly paternal flavor. Howells, like Larcom, loves his “boy,” his child self, best. 7 Howells’s efforts to merge trenchant idealism with narrative distance produce a narrative that combines the sanctity of a pre-industrial (and for Howells, a pre-intellectual) childhood with the sense that it is all doomed to vanish. Focusing on the landscape, the narrator recalls waking one morning “and seeing a peach-tree in bloom through the window beside his bed; and he was

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always glad that this vision of beauty was his very earliest memory. All his life he has never seen a peach-tree in bloom without a swelling of the heart” (p. 715). This early impressionability is supported by Howells’s reference to his sense of familial security when describing his father’s “long cloak of blue broadcloth. . . . To get under its border, and hold his father’s hand in the warmth and dark it made around him was something that the boy thought a great privilege, and that brought him a sense of mystery and security at once that nothing else could ever give” (pp. 713–14). Although couched in a history of Euramerican wardrobes (Howells notes that “This cloak was a garment as people still drape about them in Italy, and men wore it in America then instead of an overcoat”), the narrative attends equally to the bonds of family and broader historical trajectories (pp. 713–14). Howells’s narrative ends, like Larcom’s, with his family’s removal to a larger town and with a corresponding redefinition of self. As a young adolescent of twelve, Howells notes that “the world within claimed him more and more” (p. 875), alluding to his growing interest in literature; he ceased, as he claims, “to be that eager comrade he had once been” (p. 875). The affective ruptures soon follow. Upon learning that the family will leave town, he “proudly” discussed his future of “living in the larger place” (pp. 874–5), for when the move was announced, “he did not dream that as the time drew near it could be sorrow” he would feel (p. 875). Yet what he actually felt, Howells relates, was an “anguish of bitter tears” (p. 875). More importantly, he learns something about the incomplete nature of mature feeling when he is allowed to revisit his childhood home several months after the move. It is a journey that can lead only to disappointment, as he discovers, for he finds himself “searching about in a ghostly fashion for his old comrades . . . They received him with a kind of surprise; and they could not begin playing together at once in the old way. He went to all the places that were so dear to him; but he felt in them the same kind of refusal, or reluctance, that he felt in the boys. His heart began to ache again, he did not quite know why; only it ached” (p. 878). As a transition out of childhood, this moment reveals a deep attachment for the familiar, even while Howells’s “boy” apprehends an emotional cleavage that cannot be repaired. He has lost his former, easy relations with his friends and, for the first time, recognizes that he may be the object of partial and qualified regard. Even the narrator’s regard for “my boy” appears somewhat diminished. He returns to his grandmother’s house, “bruised and defeated” (p. 878), and his heart, he writes, “turned from the Boy’s Town as lovingly as it had turned towards it before” (p. 879). By the time the boy returns to his parents, he is no longer a child, but a “traveled and experienced person . . . wholly cured” of a longing for his childhood (p. 880). That such emotionally infused moments occur in the narrative of the preeminent realist of his generation is less a testament to Howells’s range (although it is also that) than a symptom of the difficulty of rendering childhood a realistic subject. As did Larcom, Howells divides a satisfyingly sentimental childhood from his narrative of disruptive and incomplete adolescence,

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portraying adolescence as a less satisfying period he cannot fully embrace and during which he can no longer view himself as embraceable. For Howells and for other period authors, a changed sense of himself overlaps with prevalent turn-of-the century theories of child development. Howells’s reliance on G. Stanley Hall’s theory of adolescence, in particular, appears in passages such as the following. The Young People may have heard it said that a savage is a grown-up child, but it seems to me even more true that a child is a savage. Like the savage, he dwells on an earth round which the whole solar system revolves, and he is himself the centre of all life on the earth. It has no meaning but as it relates to him; it is for his pleasure, his use; it is for his pain and his abuse. It is full of sights, sounds, and sensations, for his delight alone, for his suffering alone. He lives under a law of favor or of fear, but never of justice, and the savage does not make a crueler idol than the child makes of the Power ruling over his world and having him for its chief concern. (p. 714) Here Howells invokes Hall’s notion of a socially recuperative savagery as a privilege of young boys, extolling the values of world of sensation, even the mild forms of his own imagined “outlawry” that, at the time, “seemed beyond the bounds of civilization” (p. 732).8 Yet the full exercise of these pre-civilized impulses constitutes a promise of therapeutic socialization. That the landscape of his boyhood allowed for primal release, for Howells, makes it experientially ideal and emotionally uncomplicated. But when the boy ceases to view himself as uncomplicated—as now partial and incomplete, his childhood ends, as Hall intimated in his 1904 study, Adolescence. Although Hall’s goal was to produce a generation devoted to a “higher level” of life (p. xiii), his view of early childhood encompassed the “truly humanistic and liberal” heart and the “rudimentary organs of the soul,” suggesting the simplicity of the child’s affective canvas (p. x). For Hall, the “deep and strong cravings in the individual” bespeak the “ancestral experiences and occupations of the race” (p. xi) or the “echoes of the vaster, richer life of the remote past” harkening to the “tribal, predatory, hunting, fishing, fighting, roving, idle, playing proclivities” (p. x). If adolescence was an embodiment of “some ancient period of storm and stress when old moorings were broken and a higher level attained,” as Hall described it, then the narrative inscription of that “higher level” demanded greater complexity (p. xiii). Clearly, the socialized and psychologically reorganized young adult was another being altogether. Such a theory’s influence on the literary sphere is clear, but it should also be pointed out that what memoirists add to this developmental concern is the unfulfilling nature of life after childhood. Whether savage or sincere, the feelings of the child, by these accounts, are more visceral and satisfying, if somewhat less available to a realist narrative. And if, as I have suggested, a portrait of a

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sentimental childhood propelled the inverse depiction of an uncomfortable, unfulfilling adolescence (which the moderns would extend into searing critiques of an adolescent subculture), then we should consider memoirists’ sentimental moments in the context of their pointed generational consciousness.9 Hence, it appears that a sentimental portrait of childhood comprises less of acquiescence to popular taste than it suggests a broad historical concern with the nature of maturity and how it was experienced as well as rendered. While an individual’s physical remove creates the rupture out of childhood for many memoirists, for Henry James, his family’s behavioral and psychological distance from an ideal family life was clear to him throughout his childhood; while his grandmother lived in Albany, New York, the Jameses turned to New York City hotel life. As James recognized in A Small Boy and Others (1913), “the sweet taste of Albany probably lured most in its being our admired antithesis to New York,” setting up an affective contrast between the unconditional affections he associated with Albany and, by contrast, his emerging sense of individuality (p. 4). Self-consciously defining himself as a “hotel child,” James describes his family’s travels, but always with an eye to the ideal, pastoral family scenes he occasionally glimpsed (p. 16). “Homesickness was a luxury I remember craving from the tenderest age—a luxury of which I was unnaturally, or at least prosaically, deprived,” James writes (p. 8). And while James claims that he would not have “exchanged my lot with that of any small persona more privately bred,” he stresses the “shame” of a childhood spent in hotels in the United States and on the continent (p. 16). The price of a cosmopolitan education, for James, comes with an exposure to the “dust and glare and mosquitoes and pigs and shanties and rumshops” he occasionally views (p. 17) as James lived the life of a precocious child separated from other children and inclined toward what he terms the “inward life” that guided so many in his family (p. 30). Despite James’s reputation as one of the most sophisticated and self-aware of realists, his portrayal of his early childhood shares sentimental tendencies with other memoirs. Describing a visit to a family in the vicinity of New Brighton, who host an “infantile scene” in a place he situates as a respite from hotel life, James casts the following passage as one of his earliest memories, recalling a quite lovely embowered place, on a very hot day, and among whom luxuries and eccentricities flourished together. They were numerous, the members of this family, they were beautiful, they partook of their meals, or were at the moment partaking of one, out of doors, and among the then pre-eminent figure in the group was a very big Newfoundland dog on whose back I was put to ride. That must have been my first vision of the liberal life—though I further ask myself what my age could possibility have been . . . But the romance of the house was particularly in what I have called the eccentric note, the fact that the children, my entertainers, riveted my gaze to stockingless and shoeless legs and feet, conveying

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somehow at the same time that they were not poor and destitute but rich and provided—just as I took their garden-feast for a sign of overflowing food—and that their state as children of nature was a refinement of freedom and grace. (p. 16) Even with its eccentricities of deportment, the anonymous family becomes the subject of some of James’s most idealizing strains, featuring domestic security and unconstructed play. According to the time frame James outlines, moreover, his recognition of the “liberal life” is assigned to the experienced adult narrator; by contrast, his sense of the beautiful, casual affections of the family emerge from the child’s felt experience. James’s sense of his own family’s domestic inadequacy, by contrast, yields a pronounced self-sentimentalization. Throughout his text, childhood serves as a sentimental subject, though treated in the peculiar, involuted style characteristic of James’s late years. Through a story reflection and unrelenting self-analysis, expressed through a style seemingly unsuited to the simplicity he attributed to childhood, James inscribes a productive tension between a stylistic tendency toward analytical discursiveness and a comparatively straightforward subject. What results is a circuit of subject and representation that renders an ideal childhood both pre-modern and pre-realist, but at the same time, a source of a critical fascination to the consciousness that is both modern and self-consciously realistic.10 Dominant critical interpretations of James’s memoir, in fact, rest largely on its stylistic complexity, a feature that upholds James’s reputation as a psychological realist filled with a looming sense of personal inadequacy and characterized by an ironic, self-deprecating sense of humor. And yet, like other turn-of-the-century writers, James constructs his early childhood as a site of what could be termed normative cultural expectations for unqualified feeling. At the apex of James’s relational sensibility is his grandmother’s house. I see the world of our childhood as very young indeed, young with its own juvenility as well as with ours; as if it wore the few and light garments and had gathered in but the scant properties and breakable toys of the tenderest age, or were at the most a very unformed young person. . . . It exhaled at any rate a simple freshness, and I catch its pure breath, at our infantile Albany, as the very air of long summer afternoons—occasions tasting of ample leisure, still bookless, yet beginning to be bedless, or cribless; tasting of accessible garden peaches in a liberal backward territory that was almost part of a country town, tasting of many-sized uncles, aunts, cousins, of strange legendary domestics. (p. 2) This summer idyll, combined with a sense of absolute security, forms James’s quintessential vision of what childhood should be: pure, easy, and liberal—and oppositional to his experiences as a “hotel child.”

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James’s coexisting interests in portraying an idyllic, affective childhood and a deeply self-conscious subjectivity lead to a complex portrayal of his adolescent anxieties, including his pronounced sense of sibling rivalry, his presumed personal inferiority, and his obsession with “wondering and dawdling and gaping” in the city (p. 14), or passages that produce the narrative of psychosexual alienation characteristic of James’s late writing. If, as Mark Goble (2004) suggests, the young James of New York City embraced the squalor and liberty of urban living, the moments when James claimed he hoped to “receive an impression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration,” the adult James feels “no grain of my sympathy” for his inquisitive self, considering himself “foredoomed” to overtly sensitive behaviors (Small Boy: 13–14). Although Michael Davitt Bell contends that James presents himself as “socially marginal,” delighting in his alienation from any construction of “normal” life (1993: 73), it must be pointed out that however much James relished the uniqueness he equated with his artistry, he laments that he and his siblings were “for considerable periods, during our earliest time, nothing less than hotel children,” setting himself up as the pathetic counterpart to an embraceable child ensconced in domestic sanctity (Small Boy: 16). That is, James denies the privileges of bourgeois living (of which travel, for example, was a part) in order to stress his longing for the ideal of protected, familial, nurturing, and sentimental childhood. For the “unformed young person” he was (or wishes he was) during his early youth, James is lavishly, tenderly respectful (p. 2). As it invokes dual visions of James’s formative years, the protected child and the exposed, inquisitive youth, the memoir reserves its unconditional affections for early youth. Thus, for all the sophistication James claims, he nonetheless clings to the earliest moments of his narrative—the slanting sunlight and pastoral play in the protected grass of someone else’s home—not his. Suffering from the absence of an idyllic childhood, his narrative inscribes the significance of this early sense of loss.11 In such overtly affective terms, turn-of-the-century memoirs are notable not only for their depiction of the child, but also for their attention to narrating the magnitude of feeling oneself slip from one developmental category and into another, and along with this shift, an attending set of relational changes; most significant among these is the author’s qualified regard for a self that is no longer a child, no longer embraceable, yet a deep reverence for the child of the nineteenth-century past, one not yet aware of the discontinuities of the modern world. What is most surprising about his formulation, in the end, is the suggestion that the “natural” child who forms the sentimental locus of the memoir corresponds with the notion of a parallel “naturalness” in rebelling against the restraints of the realist narrative, that even from self-proclaimed realists, the subject of childhood demanded a sentimental strain.

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Notes 1

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From 1880 to 1900, the number of people (of all races) living in urban areas rose 118 percent, and the number of nonwhite, nonAfrican Americans rose by 81 percent (Haines 2006). Betsy Klimasmith writes that during the nineteenth century, “the city became ‘modern,’” establishing a link between urban growth and cultural modernity (2005: 3). Although Suzanne Clark’s Sentimental Modernism (1991) attests to the presence of emotional narratives within modern texts, like Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture (1977), it views sentimentality as a capitulation to the popular. Clark writes, despite a “despised history of emotional sympathy,” the moderns invoked sentimentalism explicitly, at times as a sign of banality and, at other times, to express subversion of highbrow values (1991: 8). A host of earlier nineteenth-century writers also invoked a sentimental child, but they, unlike the turn-of-the-century memoirists, tend to read the child as an index to adult character. Larcom’s poetry appeared in the Lowell Offering, a monthly magazine published from 1840 to 1845; initiated by self-improvement advocates, it became the literary vehicle of the mill workers. The women who contributed to it were, at the time, the most highly paid female industrial workers in the country. See Sánchez-Eppler, who describes the “body as a privileged structure for communicating meaning” (2005: 32) and who contends that in sentimental fiction, “emotion can be attested and measured by physical response,” through “bodily signs” (pp. 26–7). Kidd describes Howells’s narrative alongside a list of other “bad boy genre” texts (2004: 52). Goodman and Dawson, Howells’s biographers, describe his decision to discuss himself as “my boy” as a realist mechanism. When Howells referenced himself in third person, they argue, he launched a “construction suggesting the distance and methods of fiction writing, rather than the personal intimacy of autobiography” (2005: 310). Cooley also writes that this “voice resembles the persona or “presence” of Howells’s “Editor’s Study” column” (1976: 589). See Bederman (1995) for a discussion of Hall’s theories of development in relation to constructions of American manliness. See Dolan’s (1996) Chapter 1 on critiques of both the “young” and “lost” generations populating modern literature. Cooley describes Howells’s “realist humor” in the piece as “defense mechanism” against the morbid dimensions of his narrative (1976: 587), much like Howells’s “decorous narrator,” who helps him achieve a guise of neutrality (pp. 588–9). This treatment of the imperiled child sheds light on fictions such as What Maisie Knew, The Turn of the Screw, and The Awkward Age.

Chapter Twelve The Cultural Work of Kate Douglas Wiggin: Cultivating the Child’s Garden Anne Lundin

Come, let us live with our children. (Friedrich Froebel)

In the summer of 1879, Kate Douglas Wiggin (1856–1923), a fervent twentythree-year-old ‘kindergartner,’ traveled the United States from California to New England to learn more about this child-saving cause changing her life. After meeting with various kindergarten leaders in St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, and Boston, Wiggin went to Concord, where she spent a memorable week with Elizabeth Peabody, the pioneer educator and philosopher who initiated the first English-speaking kindergarten in United States. Wiggin attended during the very first session of the Concord School of Philosophy, whose speakers that week included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Julia Ward Howe, and William Ellery Channing. While the lectures seemed profound and metaphysical, Wiggin acknowledged later in her autobiography, “Before one knew exactly what transcendentalism was, one ‘caught’ it.” (My Garden 1923: 150). What was it that Wiggin would have “caught”? How was Kate Douglas Wiggin a cultural site for contested terrain, with profound effects and troubling ironies? I am struck by Joan Scott’s use of the term sites, a sense of the discursive and material forces that inform individual history, a context “where crucial contests are enacted” (1996: 16). Many of these tensions were within Wiggin, who propelled herself on to the national scene with her writing and speaking, and yet took an official anti-suffragist stand. She appeared at an April 1913 U.S. Senate hearing on woman suffrage and argued that women should bear “the burden of the weak” yet remain in the background away from the fray (“Woman

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Suffrage” 1913: 2–3). That seeming contradiction helped to quicken my interest in the effects of Romanticism on feminist reforms. How sheltered was the garden as a social space for modernization in early education and women’s history? Mythically, gardens represent a female domain: a contained space in which women, driven from the masculine business world, find their own fertile land to cultivate, to domesticate, to refine and civilize as a humanized framework, a restorative environment. And yet ever political. Gardens are ambiguous female spaces, part way between domestic enclosure and the public world, a thorny paradise. How did the garden grow as a cultural site for kindergarteners, children’s book authors, and children’s librarians? Kate Douglas Wiggin in her many roles offers a frame by which to see these progressive forces at play on a contested terrain. Progressive Era Transforming the cultural landscape was the complex task of the postwar years considered to be the Progressive Era, roughly 1885–1915, what historian Steven Mintz called “a watershed in the history of child welfare” with enormous achievements in public health, urban recreational spaces, and day nurseries and kindergartens (2004: 173). While historians debate how progressive the Progressive Era really was—or how gilded the Gilded Age—the decades of the later nineteenth century and early twentieth century are marked by innovation and conflicts on almost every front. Soaring new wealth, technology, immigrant urban populations, and a culture of materialism (what Louis Mumford would later call “the goods society”) created immense social change with impact on children. International expositions held in the United States displayed the material world in unprecedented scope. All things seemed possible in an era of optimistic energy, ethical concerns, and consumer abundance. As historian Lynn Gordon notes, “Progressives exuded confidence that human beings could ameliorate the deficiencies of the national life while remaining within a traditional American framework” (1990: 3). Lawrence Cremin in his classic The Transformation of the School (1961) argues that Progressivism was part of “a vast humanitarian effort to apply the promise of American life—the ideal of government by, of, and for the people—to the puzzling new urban–industrial civilization that came into being during the latter half of the nineteenth century” (p. viii). The idea of education became the prime mover in that transformation. Cremin went on to critique the movement as inadequate to both spectrums of society, those whose familial education was impoverished and those for whom it was rich. Revisionist scholars from related fields of education, social work, and library history have questioned the seeming altruism of the movement in its implicit notions of social control. While historians since the 1950s argue whether the Progressive movement was humanitarian or conservative, the ambiguity of the period is captured by Jackson Lears’s No Place of Grace, a sense of anti-modern dissent that was “not merely a recurrence of a timeless romantic

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theme (though it drew on long-standing literary conventions), and that it was intimately bound up with specific social and cultural transformations in turn-of-the-century America” (1994: xi). I view Kate Douglas Wiggin as an ambivalent romantic and reformer within that social critique seeking to reconcile the American Dream with the “recovery of Eden,” what environmental historian Carolyn Merchant calls the compelling narrative of the American experience (2003: 133). The pioneer movement, the transformation of the wild heartland into a “Garden of the New World,” captured the imagination of Americans down to the twentieth century, as illustrated by Henry Nash Smith in his book, Virgin Land: The American Wilderness as Symbol and Myth (1950). The swell of populations westward created new communities that settled and cultivated the land, transforming the great Interior Valley into a garden. This dominant symbol reveals a “collective representation, a poetic idea” defining American potential (p. 124). The garden expressed a cluster of images of growth, harvest, and labor in the earth. As Jackson Lears argues, to anti-modernists of the late nineteenth century, romanticizing nature represented both a criticism of life and a refuge from life. Anti-modern dissenters reacted to the ethic of “instrumental rationality that desanctified the outer world of nature and the inner world of the self, reducing both to manipulable objects” (1994: xi). Surely, Friedrich Froebel’s kindergarten, or “child’s garden,” suggests a cloister of social meaning related to the context of the child learning, the child growing. Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse (1882) illustrates the ways by which writers were instrumental in the making of certain kinds of subjectivities. Like other potent images, gardens evoke varying perceptions and beliefs central to a culture of childhood. Romanticism The garden trope evokes the fertile Romanticism of late nineteenth-century America, described by Anne Scott MacLeod as a high point in the Romanticism of childhood, with the popular culture sentimentalizing children’s beauty and innocence, and aesthetes embracing childhood in nature with a mythic aura (1994: 117). And reformists capturing the ideological rhetoric in their “sensational designs” to change the world. Romanticism resonated in Kate Douglas Wiggin’s writings, with fervent Wordsworthian chords. In her book Kindergarten Principles and Practices (1896), co-authored with her sister Nora Smith, Wiggin discusses children’s receptivity to spirituality, citing Wordsworth as “the kindergartner’s poet” and quoting five lines from the Ode as evidence of “the simple creed of childhood” (p. 54). In her autobiography, Wiggin describes the impact of her teacher training in Wordsworthian terms: “a brightness ‘fell into the air’ that never faded until the years brought the ‘inevitable yoke’ of Wordsworth’s immortal Ode, and Custom began to lie upon me with a weight ‘heavy as frost, and deep almost

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as life.’ That ‘inevitable yoke’ and ‘weight of custom’ never falls early upon those who live with children” (My Garden 1923: 99). In reflecting upon her years in Silver Street kindergarten in San Francisco, she writes: The study and practice of the kindergarten theory of education and of life gave me, while I was still very young, a certain ideal by which to live and work, and it has never faded. We kindergartners built our faith on Wordsworth’s immortal ode, and so . . . we learned never wholly to lose our glimpse of that “celestial light” that in childhood “appareled meadow, grove, and stream, the earth and every common sight”; and to hold to that attitude of mind and heart which gives to life, even when it is difficult, something of “the glory and freshness of a dream.” (p. 126) In her first book of fiction with a Maine setting, Timothy’s Quest (1895), the author describes the heroine Gay in words evocative of the kindergartener’s creed, quoting (in some deviation) from Wordsworth’s Ode: Born in misery and probably in sin, nurtured in wretchedness and poverty, she had brought her “radiant morning visions” with her into the world. Like Wordsworth’s immortal babe, “with trailing clouds of glory” had she come, from God who was her home; and the heaven that lies about us all in our infancy . . . that Garden of Eden into which we are all born, like the first man and the first woman . . . that heaven lay about her still, stronger than the touch of earth. (p. 139) In Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), Wiggin pays tribute to the poet with her epigraph introducing and interlacing her novel, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, with several chapters named after lines from the poet; “The Vision Splendid” portrays Rebecca’s graduation and passage into life with echoes of Wordsworth’s Ode (stanza five): The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended . . . One of the final chapters, “The Inevitable Yoke,” refers to lines from stanza eight. Wordsworth also appears as the beloved poet of one of the author’s most popular heroines, Mother Carey. The irony is that Wordsworth’s romanticism heralded the individual child, whereas Wiggin’s romanticism upheld the child in community, an alternative romanticism closer in spirit to women educators/ authors such as Maria Edgeworth. While Wiggin and others appropriated Romantic rhetoric, their practice revealed a more feminist model: a perspective that emphasized the values of

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domesticated nature and community, shared rather than solitary experiences. Women lacked the leisure, the freedom, to wander far, to adventure into the depths of Nature for a sense of mystical communion or adversarial conflict. Women tended to stay close to home, to build gardens, to create communities, to espouse harmony, values associated with a more feminist romanticism, in with nature, as Anne Mellor writes, “a source of divine creative power as much as a female friend or sister with needs and capacities, “a more quotidian celebration of common life” (1993: 209). To scholar Mitzi Myers, the Romantic paradigm is “our foundational fiction, our ordinary myth . . . the ‘always already’ saidness of the Romantic literary discourse on childhood” (1999: 45). While male tropes of wildness have epitomized Romanticism, women’s developmental stories and envisioned communities have been relegated to nonliterary status, as educational treatises, pictures of everyday life, simple nursery fare, a child’s garden. Sentimental/Sensational Designs Wiggin’s romantic sensibilities conjoined her reformist politics. To contemporary Nina Vandewalker, in her 1908 study, The Kindergarten in American Education, Wiggin was the most instrumental figure in “building up kindergarten sentiment” (p. 66). The word “sentiment” is significant, considering the Victorian understandings of sentimentality or “sacred tears,” as Thackeray called them. In Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (1985), Jane Tompkins elevates sentimental rhetoric of mid-nineteenth century by its “sensational designs” to change the world, its “cultural work” toward civic good. I view Wiggin’s cultural work within that framework. Wiggin’s kindergarten crusade was part of a larger movement of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, striking in its stories of women’s agency and civic creativity. Women such as Wiggin turned to the helping professions and related fields in a period when few avenues were open to women. At the same time women’s role within the family as moral teacher became more prominent. In Wiggin’s popular novel Mother Carey’s Chickens (1911), Professor Lord notes Mother Carey’s “uncommon knowledge of young people” and asks if she had ever been a teacher. She responds, with a smile, “I am just a mother—that’s all” (p. 261). Hardly all, Wiggin suggests in her awareness of the new saliency of mother as teacher, a critical component of Froebel’s kindergarten plan. As Viviana Zelizer shows, “the sentimentalization of children was intimately tied to the changing world of their mothers.” (1994: 9). The increasing domestication of middle-class women in the nineteenth century, as family historian Carl Degler notes in At Odds, “went hand in hand with the new conception of children as precious.” Changing attitudes toward the child served women’s interests: “Exalting the child went hand in hand with exalting the domestic role of women; each rein forced the other while together

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they raised domesticity within the family to a new and higher level of respectability” (1980: 73–4). To Barbara Beatty, the women aligned with the kindergarten movement were engaged in political liberalism, especially in terms of the agency of women. Froebel found women to be “the most oppressed and neglected of all” groups in society (quoted in Beatty 1995: 47). His plan was to free them by linking their interests and talents to child-rearing and education. While scholars debate whether Froebel’s ideas should be considered feminist in light of this nurturing mission, his advocacy of women fits into a category called “maternalist,” defined as a group more interested in the protection and social welfare of women and children than with women’s rights. To Beatty, Froebel’s “essentialized definition of women’s biologically determined nature and role in society and his linkage of women’s and children’s welfare” suit the maternalist realm (p. 48). Wiggin’s own political activity in the kindergarten cause reveals her own ambivalence between children’s and women’s rights. Froebel’s Kindergarten Wiggin became converted to the movement through the work of Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), a progressive educator and philosopher of early preschool development. A German educator who had worked with Pestalozzi at his school in Switzerland, Froebel created a system of education for young children that emphasized the nurturing development of the child, the value of women teachers, and the use of games and objects rather than letters and books. After the revolutions of 1848, the Prussian government banned kindergartens along with other suspect reform movements. Froebel’s ideas of teaching young children through organized play, the use of the hands and the senses, and nature study spread through liberal-minded expatriates who transported the ideas throughout Western Europe and America. Froebel believed that every child is born with optimal educational ability but must be loved and stimulated to develop fully. Believing that “all progress depends on education,” Froebel urged preschool training that drew upon the child’s natural inclinations and allowed opportunities for play, in a setting of organic growth and aesthetic interest. Originating the term “child-centered,” he believed the essence of teaching to be adapting the subject to the present stage of development of the child. With the name kindergarten (“child’s garden”) Froebel extended the metaphor of the child as a plant to be cultivated in accordance with nature’s laws. The kindergarten was also to be a real garden for children, in which each child would have an individual garden as well as a share in larger flower and vegetable gardens. The garden became a vital environmental component where children were influenced by the impressions of natural learning. The child, a “thirsty plant,” is aroused to activity by interests cultivated and ripened. In his Mother Song and other volumes, Froebel described the need for sense training by using colors, shapes, and textures. The carefully organized program consisted of a series of gifts, beginning with a ball and leading to other shapes in “the

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progressive course of development and education of the child in a logical sequence” (1895: 146). Like the Transcendentalists, attracted to pantheistic idealism, Froebel believed that the material world was only an outward expression of an inward divinity, manifestly embodied in young children. Like the Romantics, Froebel espoused the Wordsworthian idea of the divinity of childhood; “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” as the poet writes in his Immortality Ode. Indeed, the first line of the Ode—“the Child is father of the Man”—could be said to represent the essence of Froebel’s philosophy. To radical educator and Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, describing the experimental program in 1860, the kindergarten in its playfulness was “the child’s Paradise regained for those who have lost theirs” (Shapiro 1983: 17). Within decades the kindergarten in its romantic neologism would achieve legitimacy as a contested site for a variety of women reformers engaged in an ethic of care and community in schools, libraries, and community service. Froebel’s ideas reached the United States in the mid-nineteenth century just as social and political roles for middle-class women were being challenged. As part of a growing discourse on defining the proper role of proper Victorian womanhood—the “woman question”—the kindergarten movement fitted the expectations of women to function as caretakers of society. Women had long been considered to be responsible for child-rearing within the private world of the family. Increasingly education, even of the very young, became more of a public concern necessary for the preservation of the social order and the rearing of the next generation of citizens. However, the concern was political with conservatives protecting the authority of the family over child-rearing, and liberals offering alternative values in educational institutions. The kindergarten as a public site provided professional opportunities for women while potentially freeing mothers for public activities. From 1880 to 1920, the height of the movement, women activists drew on a feminist and maternalist ideology based on a belief in a traditionally female sphere to shape public policy on child welfare. Kindergartners, as they were called, were among the most adamant women seeking professional recognition for their expertise on matters relating to the family and community. Espousing the gendered dimensions of kindergarten training, Wiggin found the kindergarten to be “in truth a school of life for women.” Froebel offered a belief system: “faith in the universality and immutability of the law of love when it is applied intelligently, faith in childhood and its original purity, faith in humanity and its ultimate destiny” (Wiggin and Smith 1896: 185). Opportunities for kindergarten training flourished in the 1870s and 1880s, during which time Kate Douglas Wiggin became converted to the cause. Born in Philadelphia in 1856, Kate and her family moved to Portland, Maine and then to southern California in 1873. In her autobiography, Wiggin writes, “Stepping westward’ was symbolically, only another mile of a life-journey, but ‘the long trail’ carried me to heights and depths of experience never suspected

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in all my former wanderings in the land of dream” (My Garden: 53). After the death of her stepfather and ensuing family economic hardship, Wiggin looked toward a career in early childhood education, stimulated by Caroline Severance (1820–1914), a dynamic reformer with New England roots: abolitionist, suffragist, freethinker, and women’s club organizer. Women’s clubs were often pivotal sites for education for women and a central force in the Progressive Era. Wiggin recalled her as a fairy godmother and described her as “an obvious leader among women, who were then called of the ‘advanced’ type. She was a born reformer who advocated dress reform, improved diet, universal suffrage, and economic opportunities for women (p. 90). In one of her clubs Severance learned about the kindergarten from Elizabeth Peabody (1804–94), the noted Transcendentalist who was the movement’s strongest voice. Severance recruited Wiggin, also a New Englander now Californian, to be one of the first trained teachers. From the start, Wiggin felt empowered; “If I had been made of timber and a lighted match had been applied to me, I could not have taken fire more easily” (p. 90). Along with the help of Felix Adler, founder of the Ethical Culture Society, she helped establish the Silver Street Kindergarten in the Tar Flats Slum in San Francisco on September 1, 1878, opening the first free kindergarten west of the Rocky Mountains with a class of fifty needy students. The following summer Wiggin consulted with various prominent kindergarten leaders and spent a memorable week with Elizabeth Peabody at the Concord School of Philosophy, to which Wiggin was introduced to Transcendentalist thinking, which, in her words, she “caught.” Transcendentalism For Transcendentalists, the child in its innocence symbolized human potential with spiritual self-knowledge the object of early education. Wiggin discovered the power of femininist pedagogy and prose through the life and works of Elizabeth Peabody, devotee of Transcendentalism. Elizabeth, the eldest of the illustrious Peabody sisters, participated in the literary and philosophical activities of the Transcendentalists and worked as a teacher with Bronson Alcott in his experimental Temple School. Recent scholarship (Elbert et al. 2006; Marshall 2005) has revealed Elizabeth Peabody’s generative role as a Transcendentalist and as the reformist power behind the kindergarten movement. Elizabeth Peabody was the apostle of the kindergarten movement, its first advocate and activist. After meeting Margaretha Meyer Schurtz, a German émigré who started the first kindergarten in Watertown, Wisconsin in 1856, Peabody read Froebel’s Education of Man, which convinced her to open the first kindergarten in Boston in 1860 and then to travel to Germany to study further the “new education” in which she was deeply engaged. In the first kindergarten manual published in the United States, Peabody defined this new form of education largely by what it was not: neither the “old-fashioned infant school,” nor a “primary public school,” but a kind of natural community for the very

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young: “a garden of children” (Mann and Peabody 1863: 9). Peabody’s prolific writings on the subject of education, included her earlier writings on the Temple School, Record of a School (1835, 1836); three nationally published and widely distributed reports to the Commissioner of Education (1870–71), her own journal, Kindergarten Messenger (1873–77), over a hundred articles in numerous journals, newspapers, and books; numerous reviews, translations, and publications; and later, Lectures in the Training School for Kindergartners (1886) (Baylor 1965: 191–224). In her autobiography, My Garden of Memory, Wiggin praised Peabody for bringing the “German kindergarten ideal to America” and for her “lifelong zeal in behalf of all kinds of philanthropies and educational reforms” (1923: 150). To Wiggin, Peabody, who at that time was seventy-five years old, was that “revered and eminent champion of childhood who had been instrumental in inspiring a greater number of mothers and educators than any woman of her day” (p. 154). Wiggin’s Works After meeting Peabody at Concord, Wiggin returned to San Francisco that summer to open the doors to an experiment in “The New Education”: the first free kindergarten west of the Rocky Mountains. The Public Kindergarten Society secured quarters in an abandoned two-room schoolhouse at 64 Silver Street, the Tar Flats neighborhood. “A stranger in a strange city,” Wiggin looked beyond the overcrowded tenements and squalor while “dreaming dreams and seeing visions; plotting, planning, hoping, believing, forecasting the future.” Imagining that “roses might blossom in the desert of Tar Flats,” she looked realistically at what was possible: a kindergarten with “roots deep in the neighborhood life (My Garden: 110). Realizing the enormity of this experiment, she knew that “the kindergarten theory of education was on trial for its very life” (p. 115). The children attending the kindergarten sat together “working, playing, helping, growing—in a word, learning how to live, and there in the midst of the group was I, learning my life lesson with them. Despite the fact that the children were at times “naughty” and “willful,” she could “almost hear the beat of angels’ wings” (p. 126). These contrasting images appear in her first piece of writing, which she wrote, in her own words, as “useful propaganda” (p. 163). To raise funds for the school, she wrote a fictional story based on her experiences. The Story of Patsy (1882), published privately and distributed widely, was designed to raise funds to open more kindergartens and to solicit more students to take up kindergarten training. Drawn from her experiences at the Silver Street Kindergarten, the author recounts the experiences of a kindergarten teacher and tells the tragic story of Patsy, a crippled boy who died in his teacher’s arms as she sang the kindergarten hymn at his bedside. Reflecting on the effects of this publication with “more heart than art,” Wiggin writes: “Oh, How many kindergartens it brought to places that had never known it; how many girls read it and flew to

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the nearest training-school, unconscious, perhaps, that they were not only being fitted for teaching, but for motherhood and for life in general!” (My Garden: 162). The author pictures the kindergarten teacher as mother, nurse, guardian, provider, and spiritual counselor. Later, her sister would report that a National Commissioner of Education appreciated its “real contribution to the kindergarten cause, as potent a tract as was ever issued in the influence it had exerted and the converts it had made” (N. A. Smith 1925: 173). Wiggin’s training school graduated over four hundred students, one of whom was her sister who became a companion as teacher and writer. In addition to supervising the kindergarten, Wiggin wrote and spoke on kindergarten theory and practice, and traveled to help start other programs. Her visibility as a national figure lent credence to the cause. As kindergarten apologist, she continued to use her writing skills in her theoretical work and her fiction to help raise money for the movement. The success of her first fictional venture led to another fund-raising effort: The Birds’ Christmas Carol (1886), published by Houghton Mifflin. The story tells of a frail young invalid woman named Carol, named on Christmas day, who helps a poor neighborhood family, the Ruggles. The bestselling book was translated into various languages, frequently dramatized, and is still in print. Wiggin was encouraged by the publisher to enlarge The Story of Patsy for national publication, which began for Wiggin a concurrent career as writer and kindergarten advocate. To Frances Hodgson Burnett, Wiggin’s fictional works were “small human documentary records of kindergarten days, but in the later ones, despite her unconsciousness of the fact, it is almost impossible not to see her who writes in more than one of the valiant little beings who bring the buoyant soul into the story” (1917: vi). Over the course of her career, Wiggin wrote or edited over sixty books, most of them fiction—books for children, travel stories, and some for adults. Reviewing one such book, Polly Oliver’s Problem (1894), a critic in the Athenaeum concluded that her fiction “secured her a public larger than her admirable development of the Kindergarten system could in the nature of things command” (p. 211). This assessment remains debatable. By 1894 Wiggin’s writings on the kindergarten movement and on children’s rights were securing a large public and indeed performing cultural work as mirror and lamp. Her writings were becoming a force in not only reflecting American culture but also in constructing that culture, in changing the landscape of childhood. In an age of growing childconsciousness, Wiggin contributed to the discourse on the child as nostalgic vision—a remembrance of what is past—or a sign of the country’s future—a symbol of what is possible. Beginning in 1899, Wiggin’s advocacy of kindergarten principles through periodical pieces and monographs were helping to shape public opinion on the values and uses of Froebel’s philosophy for American education. Current Literature, a journal that included reprints of major speeches and editorials, included in 1899 a long address by Wiggin to the Froebel Society. In this extensive essay, Wiggin asks, “What is the true relation

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of the kindergarten to reform?” She describes the kindergarten as a “life-school” in which the whole child is affected in an “all-sided development.” Refuting criticism that the kindergarten movement was too metaphysical or interior, she asserts, “It would hardly seem as if too much could be said in favor of the symmetrical growth of the child’s nature.” The program offers a “rational, respectful treatment of children,” leading them to “do right for right’s sake” as “tiny missionaries helping to show the way to truth.” The kindergarten holds more promise than other forms of education, including books, called “a mighty bloodless substitute for life” (1889: 16–19). As kindergartner and author, Wiggin’s ambivalence toward print culture is shown through her series of books on the culture of early childhood. Wiggin’s book: Children’s Rights (1892) and three-volume The Republic of Childhood (1895–96) included chapters written by her sister, who also co-edited a collection of stories to be used in the kindergarten and home. The “republic of childhood” refers to Froebel’s statement that “The kindergarten is the free republic of childhood,” which serves as an epigraph to each book. The three volumes include Froebel’s Gifts, Froebel’s Occupations, and Kindergarten Principles and Practice (1895–96). The books were based on Wiggin’s lectures at the Kindergarten Training School in San Francisco. Many had also appeared previously in periodicals, such as Scribner’s, Cosmopolitan, and Babyhood. Wiggin’s political work—“the writing of these books, and of dozens and dozens of educational articles and annual reports and appeals”—were dismissed by her as not “the work of an author” but merely propaganda and a “record of interesting events” (My Garden: 163). Despite her disavowal of this genre, Wiggin excels in her ability to advocate forcefully, demonstrating what John Updike calls “a fervent relation with the world” (1984: xv). Wiggin’s high-minded, impassioned pursuit of reform is best expressed in Children’s Rights (1892), a radical text read sentimentally. That the public might not have appreciated its force is suggested by a reviewer in The Critic, who dismisses the author as “a benevolent enthusiast” whose “charm of style and sentiment” is ever present in this “little collection of essays” with its “pleasant lightness of touch” (“Children’s Rights,” The Critic 1893: 124). Reading this book over a century later, I am struck by what that critic missed—Wiggin’s simple, powerful, political prose: “Once the child is born, one of his inalienable rights, which we too often deny him, is the right to his own childhood” (Children’s Rights: 10). Wiggin argues for the public guardianship of early childhood, for the work of the kindergarten as “a philanthropic agent,” and suggests reforms in the environment of a child, including schooling, play activity, and books. In words that would have been uneasily received by librarians, Wiggin argues for an education of “head, heart, and hand,” a more organic and holistic approach to the education of young children. She ends by addressing a key question of the progressive era: “Other People’s Children.” Entreating the reader to do “the thing that ought to be, that must be done,” she appeals for help for the child of poverty “to live and thrive and grow!” (pp. 234–5).

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While Children’s Rights might be little known today, absent in histories of the child rights movement or children’s literature, one book remains her most visible presence in the literature, indeed in the pantheon of children’s classics: Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903). This lively story with its visionary imagery, protofeminist heroine, and Wordsworthian touches suggests strains of Wiggin’s “perception and sensibility,” as one critic noted. H.W. Boynton, reviewing the book in the Atlantic Monthly shortly after its appearance for the holiday season of 1903, is drawn to the author’s Dickensian skill in weaving “pleasurable emotions” with “interesting and instructive comment” (1903: 858–60). While unnoticed by contemporary critics, the book is a tribute not only to Dickens, her childhood favorite, but also to Wordsworth, her muse. Wiggin bows to Wordsworth for his evocation of that “celestial light” in childhood and “the glory and freshness of a dream,” and several chapters are named with lines taken from Wordsworth. In a memorable scene in which Rebecca stops to daydream at the river and leans against a freshly painted bridge, Wiggin writes: [H]ow many young eyes gazed into the mystery and majesty of the falls along that river, and how many young hearts dreamed of their futures leaning over the bridge-rail, seeing “the vision splendid” reflected there, and often, too, watching it fade into “the light of common day.” (Rebecca: 98–9) Values associated with her kindergarten work—the importance of education for the family and community—are also upheld in the narrative that sets grim realities in a romanticized New England setting. Rebecca undoubtedly inspired Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and other fiction in which a young girl survives chaos and loss and finds consolation within herself and her relationships. As a novelist and educator, Wiggin was a passionate advocate of stories and storytelling, a practice dear to Froebel and a mainstay of the kindergarten. Sensing the connection between kindergarten and the world about, Froebel modeled the use of stories in his classic work, Mother Songs (1844), a “family book,” created to be a Unity in itself, with thoughts on education and pictures, verses, and rhymes. In an early anthology, The Story Hour: A Book for the Home and the Kindergarten (1890), written at least a decade before librarians took up the cause, Wiggin builds the case for resurrecting storytelling, lamenting the fact that stories were out of fashion, with no Scheherazade’s or Wandering Minstrels or King’s Fool in “this prosaic nineteenth century” (p. 5). Evoking “the Person with a Story,” she recounts the avid responses of children to stories that provide “an opportunity for amalgamation of races and for laying the foundation of American citizenship” in the kindergarten, itself “a school of life and experience” (p. 11). The book offers fourteen stories in a range of genres: “narrative, realistic, imaginative, scientific, and historical, as well as brief and simple tales of the babies (p. 27). In Children’s Rights (1892), Wiggin devotes

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chapters to a discussion of children’s reading and the value of stories. In Kindergarten Principles and Practice (1897), Wiggin and her sister Nora Smith describe the making of a creative environment: “In the telling of stories, repeating bits of appropriate verse, framing of simple tales from picture-books, entering into the spirit of the symbolic games and songs of the kindergarten— in all these things a lively imagination is needed, and a truly fresh and childlike spirit” (p. 11). Steeped in idealism in America as a new world, both the kindergartner and children’s librarian were radical projects in education that drew upon the organic paradigm of the child as a plant. To the kindergartner, the child retained a transcendental awareness prompted by the environment of garden and gardener; to the librarian, the child possessed an innocent vision that was transmuted by adult influence—and print culture as cultural capital. Wiggin became a close friend of librarians, in particular Anne Carroll Moore, Supervisor of Work with Children at New York Public Library, and a prime mover and shaker. Moore anointed Wiggin ‘Godmother’ of the first Children’s Book Week in 1919 (Frederick Melcher as Godfather). Moore wrote a column in the Horn Book about Wiggin after learning of her death, in which she placed her works as “a high place in American creative writing for children.” To Moore, Wiggin was not only a true storyteller who excelled in her dramatic art but one “whose deep human interest in all children was founded upon a bedrock of practical experience and illuminated by a vision of their future” (1923: 190–1). Moore connects Wiggin’s vision of childhood to that of William Blake and William Wordsworth, who in their own ways recorded visionary children and childhood as remembrance. Kate Douglas Wiggin was instrumental in straddling social reform and story, in weaving philanthropy and philosophy into her prose, a “sensational design,” with intent to work in, and change, the world. She saw the connection between the kindergarten and social reform, demonstrating the kindergarten as a “lifeschool” informing on “the mental, moral, and physical culture of children” (Children’s Rights: 115, 135). Wiggin defined the kindergarten mission in this way: “the telling of stories, repeating bits of appropriate verse, framing of simple tales from picture-books, entering into the spirit of the symbolic games and song.” Departing from traditional instruction or schooling, the kindergarten was in essence “practical child-life, a community” (Kindergarten Principles: 14). She and other kindergarteners successfully communicated the idea that education is a process of growth and development, a leading out of nature under the skill of an “intelligent gardener.” Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse (1882) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) echo both the name and the idea. The institutionalization of an organic childhood into a kindergarten and then a children’s library expresses the Froebelian belief in the child’s consciousness, instincts, and relation to the world. Building a curriculum or building a collection with the rhythms of a child in mind is indeed related. Anne Carroll Moore, legendary library matriarch of the children’s room, saw the possibilities of the kindergarten as a model for the

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first-designed children’s library, which opened at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1897. Reporting to her library board, she wrote, “Let us use kindergarten methods as far as they help us, and by all means let us have the kindergarten spirit,” adding that the children’s library be essentially a “mental resource” toward the larger goal of “self-education” (Sayers 1972: 67). Where was learning and developing naturally through play, like plants in a garden? The children’s room—a significant symbol and sign system within the library setting—would project a spirited sense of ritual and rhyme from on high: the children’s librarian as a self-determined cultural authority within the garden walls of children’s literature. Child-centered kindergarten principles of free activity, creativity, and social participation complement library settings as well. Choosing the book as conveyer of meaning more than the child as maker of meaning inexorably shaped the direction librarians took for the next century. What Moore did not miss was the presence of story in the kindergarten plan. That became evident to a large community engaged with childhood education. In an early storytelling manual, How to Tell Stories to Children (1905), Sara Cone Bryant acknowledged Froebel’s influence in the popularity of the practice, noting the growing recognition of its educational value in various educational conferences of late. To Bryant, The function of the story is no longer considered solely in the light of its place in the kindergarten; it is being sought in every grade where the children are still children. Sometimes the demand for stories is made solely in the interests of literary culture, sometimes in far ampler and vaguer relations, ranging from inculcation of scientific fact to admonition of moral theory; but whatever the reason given, the conclusion is the same: tell the children stories. (1905: xix–xx) Moore pioneered storytelling as an active dimension of the children’s library, both at Pratt and at New York Public Library. Moore’s influence was such that storytelling swelled as part of library education as well as library programming for the young. Moore wrote an extensive article on the Story Hour at Pratt in Library Journal (1905) describing her collections, programs, and practices, such as the presence of flowers, pictures, and candles (1905: 204–11). Librarians such as Mary Emogene Hazeltine, who would a decade later become head of the library school at Wisconsin, wrote in Library Journal about the need for cooperation between librarians and kindergarteners through stories. Seeing the connection, she notes, “Librarians are happy to help kindergarteners to help the little folks, considering that in their opportunity to aid them, they are, in House-that-Jack-built fashion, helping the cause of homes and schools” (1909: 471). And, I might add, libraries. Children’s libraries ascended in the same decade as the kindergarten descended through its institutionalization in the public schools in the first decade of the twentieth century. Factions within the movement debated

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its “Germanness,” its perceived pedagogical rigidity, and its challenge from developmental psychology and literacy advocates. Children growing up in the Progressive Era found the traditional kindergarten to be unsuitable to meet the needs of modern urban education. To Barbara Beatty, the kindergarten embodied contradictions of multiculturalism and modernization: nostalgia for the countryside and the garden competed with concerns about urban poverty and crime, class conflict, and the Americanization of immigrants (1995: 201). Scientific approaches to child-rearing and education conflicted with new emerging canons of child development, as promoted by G. Stanley Hall and John Dewey. While the name remained after its absorption in the public school system, its character changed. As a critique of the dominant culture, the kindergarten was diluted by its inclusion in school bureaucracy. Marvin Lazerson demonstrates in his story of kindergartens in Massachusetts that kindergartens lost their distinctiveness when they became an adjunct of the first grade, moving from “the delicate balance they had earlier proposed between freedom and order, emancipation and discipline to a clear and overriding commitment to control” (1971: 65, 72–3). This shift denied the essential tenet of Froebel’s kindergarten: the romantic conception of the child’s goodness. Urbanization and industrialization left the garden in shambles. In its prime, the kindergarten movement represented, in sociologist Robert Putnam’s glowing words, the “greatest flowering” of the Progressive ideal to educate and assimilate (2000: 395). The kindergarten offered a rich educational experience for immigrant children and socialization for their parents; by 1908 more than 400 kindergartens were sponsored by women’s clubs, temperance groups, churches, mothers clubs, sewing clubs, and other volunteer organizations. The kindergarten generated new forms of urban community, including the settlement house movement, considered to be a kind of “kindergarten for adults” (Allen 1988: 32). To art historian Norman Brosterman (1997), the kindergarten may have influenced the course of art history, with Froebel’s teachings the bedrock education of important modern artists such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Klee, Georges Braque, among others. Fiona McCulloch finds Froebel’s ideas to be critical in formative discourses of childhood, in particular his comparisons of the young child with a young plant, best suited to the hothouse environment of the nursery and with the mother figure as gardener (2002: 9). To literary critic Juliet Dusinberre (1999), Froebel’s ideas were central to the idea of childhood in modernist children’s literature. As a library historian, I believe that the kindergarten modeled for the librarian what a child-centered learning environment for children could be. The kindergarten raised questions that remain today about public/private boundaries that defined political as well as family life, with the child a contested zone. Kate Douglas Wiggin ‘s work as writer, teacher, and activist reveals the power of women in the Progressive era to promote education as the foundation for a new social order. As Wiggin pointedly asked, “What is the true relation of the kindergarten to social reform?” Wiggin envisioned education as a radical site

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in moral and political terms that offered the possibility of transcending limits of an essentialized womanhood. Her feminist pedagogy was both idealistic and idealized, an alternative romanticism, a quotidian vision, an instructive romance of real life. Childhood was more than a distinct cultural entity but an inherent right in need of protection. She reflected and constructed attitudes about women and children that were in a state of flux, an ambiguous negotiation of traditional and new attitudes. Wiggin’s life reveals the contraries of any historical actor; she was distracted by her social life as a popular writer, opposed suffrage for women, and testified in a congressional hearing to that effect. Wiggin also wrote the book Childrens’ Rights, representing a shift in “nursery logic” that asks, “who owns the child,” and what about “other people’s children”? Whether Wiggin was a maternalist or feminist, a realist, romantic, radical, or reactionary, does not detract from her work as a cultural site, an historical marker that shows where crucial political and cultural contests on childhood were enacted. Here battles for children’s rights if not women’s rights were fought; here the best interests of the child became the charge of the mother and the state. In the ongoing construction and reconstruction of childhood, a new paradigm emerged with subtle and profound effects: a vision of social order that enlarged the private sphere into the commons. With Wiggins’s life and works we find the drama of progressive women writers discovering not only the individual child but the ground by which that childhood takes form: the secret garden, the public garden. That space is design enough, sensational design.

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Part IV Education and Shifting Paradigms of the Child’s Mind

Figure P IV: From the nineteenth-century children’s periodical Chatterbox (1884–99). Reproduced from Carol Belanger Grafton, Children: A Pictorial Archive from Nineteenth-Century Sources (NY: Dover, 1978).

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Chapter Thirteen “Heroes of the Laboratory and the Workshop”: Invention and Technology in Books for Children, 1850–1900 Eric S. Hintz

Rehabilitating Myths One day [a young Thomas Edison] was standing on the platform at the station thinking over many great things that telegraphing might do and how much he longed to study it. He looked up the railroad and saw the express locomotive coming round the curve. Right in the middle of the track, between him and the dashing engine, with its flashing headlight, he saw the little three-year-old son of the stationmaster. At the peril of his own life, he dashed in, and seizing the little one in his arms, fairly threw himself off the track, with the wheels of the great locomotive almost touching his feet. (Brooks and Meek 1897: 171–2) Thomas Edison was the quintessential “hero of the laboratory and the workshop,” famous for inventions like the phonograph and incandescent electrical lighting (Brightwell 1860). However, as the epigraph demonstrates, biographers often portrayed Edison as a hero in nontechnical settings beyond the laboratory. As Wyn Wachhorst has argued, “the Edison symbol has been a vehicle for every major American cultural theme,” and as such, his protean image made him a useful exemplar for all kinds of virtues (1981: 3).1 Accordingly, nineteenthcentury inventors such as Edison emerged as popular subjects for contemporary biographies aimed at young audiences. This chapter examines representations of inventors as depicted in popular young adult and children’s biographies published from 1850 to 1900. As subjects for children’s biographies, heroic inventors served to exemplify values that authors hoped to impart upon their impressionable readers. Some of the virtues

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illustrated by inventors were expected (e.g. perseverance, industriousness, and intellectual curiosity), while others were surprising (e.g. Protestant asceticism, temperance, and patriotism). Though these biographies were written primarily to convey moral lessons, an analysis of their value statements, common tropes, and recurrent themes should also illuminate contemporary attitudes toward invention, technology, and other aspects of nineteenth-century society, especially when placed in historical context. This type of analysis presents a challenge, since biographies for children have often been maligned, both by literary scholars and by historians of technology. Children’s biographies have traditionally misrepresented and idealized aspects of their subjects’ lives at the expense of historical accuracy (Chatton 2001: 84). Perhaps the most notorious apocryphal account was Parson Weems’s Life of George Washington, which subjected generations of American children to the false myth that young Washington patriotically chopped down his father’s English cherry tree (Coughlan 1981: 265–9; Griswold 2004: 1272–3). Where independent inventors were concerned, historian Thomas Hughes has likewise lamented that “a host of older popular biographies and children’s books have reduced the independents, in the public’s imagination, to one-dimensional heroes, thereby mystifying their creativity” (American Genesis 2004: 19–20). Thus, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, “myth-busting” had become a central concern for both historians of technology and children’s literary scholars (Layton 1973: 5; Huck and Kuhn 1968: 278). Yet, as the two disciplines have matured, scholars have moved beyond debunking to once again view older myths as viable sources of inquiry. Though factually specious as authoritative secondary sources, heroic biographies can be rehabilitated when considered as primary sources. For example, in a 2003 article for Technology and Culture, Carolyn C. Cooper wrote: As myths those stories about heroic inventors offer more levels for analysis than the one of distinguishing fact from fiction. Like other artifacts, myths are culturally shaped and can therefore yield information about [the] different cultures . . . that produced them, if we ask questions at the appropriate level. Myths tell us about belief systems of different societies, including our own. (p. 84) Cooper concluded by asserting that present-day historians of technology should “move onward, to view myths and legends about inventors not merely as false history but as stories from which to learn about the storytellers” (p. 96). But does this analytical license extend to young adult and children’s literature? One might argue that the simplicity of children’s books, their “lowness” on the cultural scale, renders them useless in a serious analysis of cultural history (Levine 1988). However, R. Gordon Kelly has argued that since “culture is learned, the processes and terms in which it is conveyed are particularly revealing to the historian interested in constructing a group’s worldview.” Therefore,

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children’s literature may be used to examine the ways in which a group defines and symbolizes the principles of order thought to structure and sustain a given way of life. Children’s stories may also define, often quite directly, the limits of permissible behavior in certain circumstances and suggest typical and acceptable modes of reward and punishment. Stories, biographies, even fantasy may all designate those attributes of character which are held to contribute most directly to a rewarding life, however that illusive ideal may be defined by a given group. (1974: 154) Essentially, Kelly suggests that the implicit norms and values of a historically particular society, often subtly concealed in more sophisticated adult texts, are overt and explicit in children’s texts. Thus, it is precisely this “lowness”— the often simplistic, exaggerated and didactic messages found in children’s books—which most clearly reflects the prevailing culture in uncomplicated terms. What, then, can we hope to learn from a corpus of children’s biographies of inventors?2 First, if nineteenth-century biographies were typically used as tools for children’s moral instruction, why were inventors specifically chosen as subjects? What kinds of values and principles were inventors thought to embody? Furthermore, having chosen inventors as their subjects, what did nineteenth-century authors want children to know about technology? If, as Thomas Hughes has suggested, technological innovation is the “most characteristic activity” of the American nation (1989: 2), then the mythology surrounding inventors in children’s literature should provide a novel perspective on the place and meaning of technology in nineteenth-century American culture. The (Nontechnical) Lives of Young Inventors: Family and Education [This book] . . . deals especially with the early life of each of twelve great men. It shows what were their natures and their habits when they were boys. It tells about their mothers and fathers and their homes; it tells of the circumstances which surrounded them and relates scores of incidents of their boyhood days, their daily doings, their jolly sports, their trials and difficulties and how they met and overcame them. It shows us what books they read, what schooling they had, how they came to be great and famous men and the wonderful things they did in the world. (1897: Brooks and Meek 11) Turning now to the specific content of these accounts, what aspects of the inventors’ lives were featured or emphasized? Since their accounts were geared toward young readers, biographers typically focused much of their attention on the inventors’ early years. As the epigraph suggests, authors emphasized those issues which would have been familiar to a nineteenth-century child:

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family relations, apprenticeships, schooling, and material conditions, such as what inventors ate, drank, and wore for clothing. Many biographers also accentuated their young inventors’ precocious mechanical abilities. For example, in an autobiographical excerpt in Edward Hale’s Stories of Invention, steam hammer inventor James Nasmyth remarked that, using his father’s lathe, he built “spinning tops in capital style, so much so that I became quite noted among my school companions” (1885: 241). Likewise, Hale wrote that the young Eli Whitney once made a fiddle, which was “examined by many persons, and all pronounced it to be a remarkable piece of work for such a boy to perform” (p. 224). These childhood technical vignettes foreshadowed an inventor’s adult success and were common in the genre. Biographers also noted each inventor’s adult technical achievements; after all, an inventor’s adult success is what marked him worthy of a biography in the first place. However, concern for the scientific and technical aspects of invention was secondary to the moral messages that biographers hoped to impart to young readers. This attention to virtue over science and technology was explicit in several accounts. For example, in the preface to their biography of Young Benjamin Franklin, Henry Mayhew and John Gilbert wrote: The one purpose of the book is to give young men some sense of the principles that should guide a prudent, honorable, generous, and refined gentleman through the world. It does not pretend to teach youth the wonders of optics, chemistry, or astronomy, but [aims] . . . to develop in them some little sense of, and taste for, the poetry of action and the grace of righteous conduct. (1862: vii–viii) Likewise, in Hale’s Stories of Invention, two characters, Hester and Alice, consider the story of Charles Goodyear, who faced bankruptcy and ill health his entire life, never capitalizing on his vulcanization process for rubber. Reflecting on their rubber galoshes and waterproof coats, Hester notes, “such a story as that . . . is worth more than anything about cut-offs or valves.” Alice replies, “if we cannot invent a flying-machine, and have not learned how to close up rivets this winter, we have learned at least how to bear up each others’ burdens” (1885: 292–3). By framing Hester and Alice’s reaction to the Goodyear story, the author explicitly de-emphasized the significance of technology, focusing instead on the importance of empathy for the less fortunate and thankfulness for one’s blessings. Most inventors’ biographies focused on those settings where young people typically spent the bulk of their lives: at home, with their families, and at school. Almost without fail, authors noted whether an inventor’s parents were cruel or kind, and at what age a parent died, leaving the inventor orphaned or with additional family responsibilities.3 For example, C.L. Brightwell described the death of Humphrey Davy’s father when the safety lamp inventor was sixteen years old. Though tragic, the hardship gave the younger Davy an opportunity

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to answer “the fond pleas of dutiful love” by taking care of his mother and siblings (1860: 52-3). Since nearly all of these proto-industrial inventors were apprentices in the artisanal system, authors also focused on these experiences. For example, most stories of Benjamin Franklin’s childhood described his career as an apprentice candle-maker to his father. According to Brooks and Meek, young Franklin wanted to be a sailor “but his father would not consent, and so Benjamin, like an obedient son, gave it up, though he often lay awake at nights and thought how grand it would be to bound over the great billows and to visit all the countries of the world” (1897: 94–5). Using these kinds of anecdote, authors stressed the virtues of filial duty and obedience. Finally, authors always described the inventors’ schooling, which varied widely; some inventors had no formal education (Joseph Jacquard), others were autodidacts or home schooled (Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison), and some even received a liberal university education (Eli Whitney). Despite the variance in educational attainment across the inventors they chronicled, nearly all biographers hoped to inspire reading and the pursuit of knowledge among their young audience. Inventors modeled these behaviors for young readers, sometimes to an absurd degree. For example, Brooks and Meek recounted the young Edison’s attempt to read every book at the Detroit Free Library: “He concluded that the way to read that library through was to begin at one end of the shelf and read along to the other end of it; then take another shelf and read to the end of it, and so on until he had read all the rows of books.” Eventually, the librarians redirected Edison, but not before he had completed “all the books along fifteen feet of one of the shelves” (1897: 167). While biographers confidently encouraged reading, they had to be careful about how they presented the attainment of formal education. Certainly, highly literate authors appreciated the advantages of their own schooling and desired a population of educated readers to consume their books. On the other hand, biographers did not want to offend any readers who may not have attended a traditional school. Thus, biographers typically found a way to praise the inventor, regardless of the formality of his schooling, while always suggesting the importance of seeking formal education. For example, C.L. Brightwell recalled the determination of locomotive inventor George Stephenson, who at age fourteen “was wholly uneducated.” There was however, a night school in the village “and this he determined to attend; by which means, at the age of nineteen, he had learned to read correctly, and ‘was proud to be able to write his own name’” (1860: 150–2). However, several authors showed disdain for traditional, philological education, in favor of new forms of practical scientific and technical training.4 During the early nineteenth century, many American secondary schools and colleges taught a classical curriculum consisting of Greek, Latin, rhetoric, literature, and philosophy designed for the refinement of gentlemen and ladies. “Natural philosophy” (i.e. science) and the “industrial arts” (i.e. engineering) were initially not part of the curriculum at places such as Harvard and Yale,

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and artisanal apprenticeships were the only outlets for technical training.5 Accordingly, some biographers explicitly voiced their frustrations at the shortcomings of classical education, both moral and technical. In the preface to Young Benjamin Franklin, Henry Mayhew faulted liberal education for trying to “force the scholar with a perfect hot-bed of languages, and yet to stunt the worthy with an utter want of principle” (1862: viii). Remembering himself as a “young man crammed to the tip of [his] . . . tongue with Latin and Greek,” Mayhew bemoaned the moral deficiencies of his own education, and penned his biography of Franklin to serve the youth as “something like a guide . . . to the right road through life’” (p. xvi). Authors also implicitly leveled their criticisms by describing episodes in which inventors and their contemporaries expressed the uselessness of classical education. For example, Hale provided an excerpt from James Nasmyth’s autobiography in which the inventor recalled, “I had high school at the end of 1820. I carried with me a small amount of Latin and no Greek. I do not think I was much the better for my small acquaintance with the dead languages” (1885: 245). Hale also described an episode in which Yale student Eli Whitney sought to borrow tools from a carpenter doing some work on a campus building. At first reluctant, the carpenter obliged, and upon witnessing Whitney’s mechanical dexterity proclaimed, “There was one good mechanic spoiled when you went to college” (p. 227). In their own words and in the inventors’ episodes they chose to convey, mechanically minded biographers reflected the rapidly changing educational climate in the nineteenth-century United States. Visceral Virtues: Poverty, Clothing, Food, Drink, and Sleep Jacquard was content if he had but daily bread, and dreamed of nothing but inventions and plans for the improvement of various machinery in the arts of weaving, cutlery, and printing. Unhappily his models and designs did not bring him in a farthing, and it was necessary to live. He sold the cottage which had been his father’s, and, little by little, parted with all he possessed. . . . For some years Jacquard lived in obscure penury, nameless and unknown. (Brightwell 1860: 81–2) Marilyn Jurich has concluded that “generally, if one is to be an honest-togoodness hero—either in this country or elsewhere—he must have known economic deprivation. Riches are not justified if the rags are not flaunted beforehand” (1972: 148). Accordingly, rags-to-riches stories were so common within the genre that it was a surprise to find a financially stable inventor, even for the characters in the story. In Edward Hale’s Stories of Invention, a character named Hester introduces the biography of steam hammer inventor, James Nasmyth:

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Now really . . . you mustn’t laugh; but do you not think that most of the people whose lives we have read have to begin horribly? They have to be beaten when they are apprentices, or their father and mothers have to die, or they have . . . to be brought up in a poor-house or something. Now nothing of that sort happened to my inventor, and I am very much encouraged. For my father never beat me, and my mother never scolded me half as much as I deserved, and I never was in a poor house . . . so I really was afraid I should come to no good. (1885: 237–8) Though Hale playfully mocked this hackneyed theme, rags-to-riches stories did serve a morally instructive purpose by suggesting that young readers of humble means could still succeed, provided they demonstrated the values embodied by inventors.6 A common trope that appeared consistently across the biographies was the image of the inventor as a tramp or vagabond dressed in shabby clothing. For example, Brooks and Meek recounted Thomas Edison’s career as an itinerant telegraph operator, and a particularly difficult journey from Memphis to Louisville: When he arrived in Louisville, he was almost frozen. The soles of his shoes were worn off, his feet were sore, he had an old straw hat on, and a poor old linen duster was all he had for an overcoat. In this poor plight, he presented himself at the telegraph office, where they received him with smiles of distrust. They thought surely he was a tramp. (1897: 175) However, in the continuation of Edison’s story, he soon won the respect of his Louisville colleagues by becoming the best telegrapher in the office. Similarly, young readers learned that fine clothing was not always a reliable measure of character. In Brooks and Meek’s account of Franklin, Pennsylvania’s colonial governor William Keith sends Benjamin to London to buy presses in order to start a Philadelphia-based printing business. However, the trip is a fool’s errand, as Keith’s credit and letters of introduction were not honored in London. Believing he had been misled, the disappointed Franklin remarked that “fine clothes do not make a fine gentleman” (p. 100). These examples taught young readers not to judge character or ability based on appearances. Authors also noted inventors’ eating and drinking habits. In the United States, the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s and 1830s provided a moral and religious foundation for the temperance movement, and accordingly, several of the biographies portrayed inventors as teetotalers. Returning again to Louisville, Brooks and Meek recounted how Edison, in the pursuit of self-education, had purchased fifty volumes of North American Review, only to be thwarted by his drunken colleagues:

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After working all night at the telegraph he went home the next morning to find that some of his mean companions had carried off the whole fifty volumes of books, put them in a pawnshop and were lying about the room drunk on the money. (p. 174) Likewise, Brightwell described how locomotive inventor George Stephenson “settled down as a regular, steady workman, so habitually sober and industrious, that he was quite a standing example of character to his fellows. Never was he known to be ‘the worse for drink’ in his life” (1860: 153). The message for young readers was clear: inventors were hard-working, responsible examples for their fellow working men, who were interested in noble pursuits like self-education; drunks were “mean,” interested only in short-term gratifications, and thus bound for failure. Again and again, nineteenth-century biographers recounted episodes in which inventors denied themselves food or drink in the single-minded pursuit of knowledge or technical achievement. For example, author James Blackwood described how Benjamin Franklin came to be a vegetarian: At sixteen years of age, [Franklin] read some twaddle by a vegetarian, and abandoned the use of animal food. And he showed an eye to business. He declined to have the same charge set against him for his board as when he ate whatever butcher’s meat was put before him; and he paid just for what he had. Out of the savings he made by this not unfair arrangement, he kept augmenting his stock of books. (1860: 258) According to Brooks and Meek, both Franklin and Edison preferred reading and studying to drinking with their companions. The authors noted that “instead of spending his evenings at the tavern drinking or gossiping, as other young men did, [Franklin] went to his room and read good books or went in the company of those of whom he could learn something” (1897: 98). Likewise, “when the other [telegraph] operators went on what they called a ‘jamboree,’ Edison remained at home and studied” (p. 174). Beyond the importance of abstemious habits, young readers also learned that intellectual attainments were much more important that corporeal concerns. Inventors also sacrificed their sleep and good health in the name of technical achievement. For example, Brooks and Meek noted that, while preparing to lay the transatlantic cable, Cyrus Field “was exceedingly busy, frequently going twenty-four hours without sleep” (p. 201). Thomas Edison was the most notorious inventor in this respect; as Brooks and Meek noted, sometimes he works for two whole days, when he becomes very much absorbed in anything, without stopping to eat or sleep. On one occasion, he locked the door and made his important workmen stay in the shop with

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him for two days and a half without any sleep, in order that he might carry out some important work that could not be delayed. (p. 180) Unfortunately, such exertions often took a toll on an inventor’s health. For example, Brightwell noted that Humphrey Davy “suffered from a serious illness in 1807, in consequence of the prolonged labour and excitement attending his grand discoveries, and was for many months incapable of carrying on his work” (1860: 52). As always, the authors focused on the bodily sacrifices required to produce the inventions, not on the inventions themselves. What did young readers learn from these “visceral virtues”—the shabby clothes, the sleepless nights, the empty bellies, and the sober but sick constitutions? On the surface, these stories taught children to groom themselves properly, and yet not to judge people by their appearances, to stay sober and work hard for success, even if it meant losing a little sleep. However, on a deeper level, these visceral virtues signified inventors as a special breed—ascetics devoted to the pursuit of technical knowledge. Steven Shapin has described this “ascetic ideal”: in tales of scientists and inventors “the truth-seeker is someone who attains truth by denying the demands of the stomach and, more generally of the body” (1998: 22). This kind of bodily suffering has always been present in children’s biographies. Scholars have suggested that John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (translated 1563) was the earliest known children’s biography in the English language. Quite literally a set of hagiographies, these grim stories described the romanticized torture and death of Christian saints as examples to inspire piety among children (Chatton 2001: 84). In a nineteenth-century analog, biographers portrayed the bodily suffering and self-denial of inventors, creating a new set of hagiographies for a modern, industrialized world. Like the martyrs whose faith could not be shaken, heroic inventors persevered and succeeded, when lesser men would have failed. As Brightwell said of textile innovator Richard Arkwright, “none but himself had the courage and determination to face the fatigues, difficulties, and dangers that lay in the way of achieving such great results—and over them all he, at last, completely triumphed” (1860: 7). By portraying their bodily selfdenial and ultimate successes, admiring biographers marked inventors as a special breed of elites, worthy of emulation. For Love of God The varied examples which the following narratives of the victories of Early Genius exhibit, afford evidence no less of the still higher worth of moral excellence and the power of that divine teaching which the gospel alone affords. . . . As the records of genius thus dignified by Christianity . . . the following biographical sketches are offered to the reader. (Nelson and Sons, Preface 1874)

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It is not surprising that nineteenth-century authors dramatized inventors’ financial and material hardships, temperance, self-denial, and industriousness, since these virtues of “worldly asceticism” were highly valued in Protestantism (Weber 1930: Ch. 4). Nearly all of the inventors represented in this selection of biographies hailed from the largely Protestant populations of England, Scotland, and the United States, and consequently there were explicitly Christian overtones in many of the accounts.7 For example, in Men Who Have Made Themselves, James Blackwood reminded young readers that the “men to whom the title ‘self-made’ has been given, have been the very first thankfully to acknowledge their perfect dependence on God for all they have been able to do and become” (1860: viii).8 Young readers often found that the most effective Christian apologies came from the inventors themselves. For example, C.L. Brightwell offered an anecdote in which scientist and safety lamp inventor Humphrey Davy vanquished a skeptic: A gentleman of the company, after the ladies had retired, thought proper to commence an attack on revealed religion, and avowed himself a professed sceptic. There were two clergymen present, whom he hoped to silence by gaining over to his side the great philosopher; and he continued for some time to utter his infidel opinions, encouraged by the silent and deep attention with which Davy listened to him. At length he paused, full of triumphant expectation, when, to the delight of some of the company, the man of genius, with deep earnestness, and eloquent language, defended the truth of Christianity. . . . The discomfited infidel retired in dismay, nor did he venture again to show his face in that company. (1860: 49) For Brightwell—and even the characters of this anecdote—Davy’s status as a scientist and inventor made him a particularly effective advocate for the Christian faith, given that scientists were often the most vocal critics of Christianity during the late Enlightenment period and throughout the nineteenth century.9 Even skeptical inventors such as Benjamin Franklin could be forgiven as long as they pursued appropriate secular virtues. For example, Blackwood noted that Franklin’s wide reading during the Enlightenment “turned his head for a time, and made him flippant and faithless. He avowed skepticism in religion, but his better instincts prevented his losing a reverence for the sanctions of morality. He even became more than needfully stoic and ascetic” (1860: 258). Likewise, in Edward Hale’s Stories of Invention, Uncle Fritz and the children’s reading group examine an excerpt from Franklin’s autobiography, in which he describes his famous method of practicing thirteen virtues. Though the children eventually discuss Franklin’s lightning rod and other technical achievements, his system of virtues is clearly the main emphasis of the chapter (1885: 100–3). Again, this suggests that the primary purpose of the inventors’

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biographies was to teach young readers about proper Christian and secular morals, more so than technology. For Love of Country These men [steamship inventor Robert Fulton and financier Robert Livingston] were both Americans; and now that they were satisfied their boat would be a success, they determined to leave Paris, come to America, and build another boat in order that the first successful trip of a steamboat in the world might be made in their own native land. This was great patriotism, and they are entitled to our honor and respect for their loyalty to their country. (Brooks and Meek 1897: 137) As the epigraph suggests, nineteenth-century biographers hoped to instill a sense of American patriotism within their young readers. But there is an irony in this anecdote: the Clermont’s steam engine was actually constructed in England and imported to the United States, along with an English engineer to operate it (Cowan 1997: 74). This omission underscores the idea that heroic tales should be read, not for factual accuracy, but for the kinds of ideologies (such as American chauvinism) that authors hoped to impart upon impressionable readers. Nation-building and imperialism were indelible features of the nineteenth century, and as part of this project, nation-states and empires took full advantage of the technological talents of their citizens.10 Accordingly, American inventors were often lauded in children’s biographies for innovations that brought domestic prosperity or facilitated the nation’s military and imperial aims. For example, Eli Whitney was typically credited with economically reviving the entire southern United States by way of the cotton gin. Writing in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Blackwood quoted a Judge Johnson, who noted that since the introduction of the cotton gin, individuals who were depressed with poverty, and sunk in idleness, have suddenly risen to wealth and respectability. Our debts have been paid off. Our capitals have increased, and our lands trebled themselves in value. We cannot express the weight of the obligation which the country owes to this invention. (1860: 297)11 Likewise, authors celebrated inventors’ patriotic contribution of military technologies. For example, Brooks and Meek described how “Congress voted three hundred and twenty thousand . . . dollars to be used in building a steam warship under Fulton’s direction” (1897: 142–3). Published in 1897, on the eve of the Spanish–American War, this biography featured an illustration of “a Modern U.S. Man of War,” described as a descendant of Fulton’s Clermont and a symbol of America’s power and prestige (p. 146). As the United States

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approached its first foray into global imperialism, the authors intimated that Fulton’s past contributions had led to the nation’s current naval strength and international stature. Thus, in both the military and domestic spheres, inventors such as Fulton and Whitney taught young readers the value of American patriotism and instilled a sense of duty to one’s country. Even where inventions were not concerned, inventors could still exemplify a proper patriotic attitude. In the same collection, Brooks and Meek recounted an episode in which itinerant telegrapher Thomas Edison contemplated traveling to South America. Edison left Louisville and arrived in New Orleans, only to find that he had missed the ship bound for the southern hemisphere. However, this was no loss, for Edison “met an old Spaniard who had traveled much and who told him that the United States was the best country in the world” (p. 174). This meeting was apocryphal, but given the contemporary tensions between the United States and Spain, the authors undoubtedly wanted young American readers to agree with the Spaniard.12 Conclusion “Do you not think that all the great things have been invented, Uncle Fritz?” This was John Angier’s rather melancholy question. “Not a bit of it, my boy. . . . You see John . . . there is enough more for you and the rest to discover.” (Hale 1885: 286–7) The late nineteenth century was a time of great social, cultural, political, and economic change. After recovering from a bloody Civil War, the United States used its military might to pacify its indigenous populations and expand westward while establishing new imperial colonies overseas. Many Darwinists had rejected God altogether and science threatened to supplant revealed religion as the ultimate arbiter of truth. Meanwhile, industrialization and urbanization had caused great social upheavals, as workers moved from the farm to the factory, and schools came to value the industrial arts over traditional Latin and Greek. Furthermore, technology had seemingly remade the natural, agrarian landscape into a “human built world” of railroads, canals, telegraph wires, and skyscrapers (Hughes, Human Built World 2004). Many pessimistic citizens —as represented in the epigraph by the melancholy John Angier—may have wondered if American society was in decline, having reached the peak of its moral and technological progress (Wiebe 1967). Yet, in response to these fin de siècle worries, Hale’s character Uncle Fritz expressed a kind of technological optimism, a belief that the next generation would continue the march of progress, inspired by their inventor heroes. An understanding of these tensions— between pessimism and optimism, past and future, traditional values and technological progress—provides the key to understanding heroic inventors as depicted in nineteenth-century children’s biographies.

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These biographies provided children with moral rather than technical instruction; consequently, surprisingly little emphasis was paid in these accounts to the various technologies that ostensibly made inventors worthy of children’s respect. Rather, inventors served as exemplars, not only of values typically ascribed to their profession, but also of a surprisingly wide set of societal values including Christian asceticism, temperance, and patriotism. Furthermore, these values were expressed not through special technical vignettes, but through situations and material concerns that would have been familiar to nineteenthcentury children, including discussions of inventors’ homes, families, schooling, clothes, and food. If the technical aspects of inventors’ lives received little emphasis in these morally instructive stories, then why were inventors chosen as suitable subjects in the first place? If biographers wanted to teach certain moral virtues through stories of family, school, clothes, and food, then seemingly any famous and admirable person could have served as an appropriate exemplar.13 Thus, why choose inventors, the heroes of the laboratory and the workshop? By focusing largely on the childhood years of famous inventors, biographers placed these men in a position to resolve the tensions and seemingly incommensurable attitudes of the late nineteenth century. In his analysis of the Edison aura, Wyn Wachhorst wrote, “as a form of myth, the culture hero functions to resolve mechanically contradictory values into a single paradoxical reality” (1981: 3). Within a single lifetime, inventors such as Edison represented the idea that a person could grow up in a traditional, agrarian world of moral certainties, and yet thrive and prosper in an increasingly urban, industrialized and morally ambiguous society as an adult. In his study of children’s presidential biographies, Michael E. James wrote that myths are “one product of transpersonal change; each time the American people underwent some cataclysmic change, myth was created” (1987: 13).14 The mythology surrounding inventors served a similar purpose. Just as George Washington’s cherry tree myth helped the fledgling nation adjust to its newfound sovereignty, myths surrounding inventors helped nineteenth-century Americans adjust to the monumental social changes brought by state-formation, educational reform, imperialism, industrialization, and secularization. New times demanded new heroes, and inventors served this purpose quite well. By examining the early years of men such as Whitney, Fulton, and Edison, authors showed children positive examples of how to succeed and act morally in a changing technological society. By virtue of their inventions, heroic inventors made their marks on the modern world, and were thus worthy of admiration. Yet, when biographers chronicled their lives, they emphasized inventors’ adherence to traditional virtues. In the transitional world of the late nineteenth century, inventors were the new heroes, straddling the old and the new, simultaneously creating a new technological society while demonstrating traditional morals and values.

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Acknowledgments I would like to thank Larry Sipe and Carol Wolfenbarger for introducing a historian of science and technology to the world of children’s literature, and the interlibrary loan department at the University of Pennsylvania Library for tracking down my sources. For their helpful criticisms, I would like to thank John Tresch, Ruth Cowan, Susan Lindee, Chris Jones and my fellow participants in Susan’s “Science in Popular Culture” seminar. Notes 1

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Virtues attributed to Edison have included industriousness, initiative, perseverance, prudence, honesty, frugality, individualism, optimism, practicality, anti-intellectualism, egalitarianism, the idealization of youth, and many others. See Wachhorst (1981: 3). For this study I consulted thirty-one different biographical sketches of inventors in young adult and children’s literature. All of the accounts were published between 1850 and 1900 and were selected primarily on the basis of my ability to gain access to extant rare materials. Some of these biographies were monographs, while others were chapters devoted to an inventor within a larger collection of biographies. All of the inventors chronicled were white men who hailed from either Europe (usually Great Britain), colonial America, or the sovereign United States. These thirty-one different biographies chronicled nineteen different inventors, since I found multiple sketches of the most famous inventors. On orphans in nineteenth-century children’s literature, see Roxanne Harde’s chapter in this volume. In this volume, the chapters by J.D. Stahl and Joan Menefee also suggest that a practical understanding of the natural world was becoming an important new aspect of children’s education in the nineteenth century. This situation began to change after mid-century with the addition of engineering schools at the traditional Ivy League colleges, and the opening of explicitly technical institutes such as the Rensselaer, Stevens, and Case institutes of technology. In addition, the Morrill Act of 1862 established federal land grants for state “A&M” colleges geared toward the agricultural and mechanical arts. On the noncollegiate track, “mechanics institutes” such as Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute and New York’s Cooper Union typically featured a program of adult education and free lectures aimed at industrial laborers. See Cowan (1997: 139–40). On poverty in nineteenth-century children’s literature, see Monika Elbert’s chapter in this volume. Of the nineteen inventors in my sample, I assume five exceptions to the Protestant rule. I assume that Irishman Richard Edgeworth, Frenchmen Joseph Jacquard and Louis Daguerre, and Czech-Austrian Alois Senefelder were Roman Catholics and that Benjamin Franklin was a Deist.

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On self-made men and other nineteenth-century constructions of masculinity, see Carnes and Griffen (1990), Hendler (1996, 2001), Kidd (2004), and Leverenz (2003). For example, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) implicitly rejected the creation narrative of the Book of Genesis in favor of a completely naturalistic theory of evolution. While some nineteenthcentury critics suggested that a state of “warfare” existed between science and religion (White 1896; Draper 1874), recent historical scholarship has suggested a much more complex and often harmonious relationship between the two enterprises, as shown by Humphrey Davy. For a historical overview, see Lindberg and Numbers (1986). The mid-nineteenth century witnessed the consolidation and reorganization of several decentralized or confederated territories, including Italy (1861), Germany (1871), Meijii Japan (1869), and the United States after the Civil War (1865). On nation-building in the “long Twentieth Century” see Maier (2000). Likewise, the nineteenth century witnessed the expansion of European and American colonial empires in Africa, Asia, Central and South America. On the use of technologies like electric telegraphs, steam ships, and railways as essential tools for gaining and administering colonial empires, see Headrick (1981). Notice Blackwell’s convenient omission of the idea that Whitney’s cotton gin and the resulting economic prosperity benefited only elite, white plantation-owners, while calcifying the institution of black slavery. For more analysis of race, slavery, and the Civil War in children’s literature see the contributions by Martha Sledge, Eric Sterling and Jeanette Barnes Lessels, and Lesley Ginsberg in this volume. For more on American patriotism and xenophobia in nineteenth-century children’s literature, see Rita Bode’s chapter in this volume. A cursory review of additional “heroic” biographies showed that authors ascribed slightly different qualities and virtues to different kinds of figures. For example, the young George Washington and young Abraham Lincoln were typically described as physically vigorous, honest, and fair, qualities one might find desirable in future political or military leaders. Likewise, future philanthropist George Peabody was shown in numerous acts of generosity as a young man. James’s analysis of mythology is based on the psychological theories of Jung and Kerényi.

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Chapter Fourteen Natural History for Children and the Agassiz Association J.D. Stahl

Louis Agassiz (1807–73) is today remembered, if at all, as a prominent nineteenth-century American scientist who opposed Darwin’s theory of evolution.1 It is true that Agassiz, who taught at Harvard and founded the Museum Comparative Zoology there, vehemently opposed the theory of evolution, advocating instead his own vision of a series of special creations to explain the variation of species. Agassiz, in his famous Essay on Classification, published in 1857, had elaborated on Cuvier’s theme of the creation of species after successive cataclysms. “He declared that species were thoughts of God and immutable and that the diversity of species was the result of repeated interventions on the part of the Creator” (Ratner 1936: 106). Despite his fame as an opponent of Darwin, however, Agassiz’s legacy in American science is perhaps most significantly to be found in the inspiration he provided to generations of American young people to pursue scientific inquiry on their own, through collections, study, and the exchange of ideas. At mid-century, Professor Agassiz was a popular and influential lecturer who also inspired many of his students at Harvard to pursue careers in botany and zoology, and had sufficient influence with the Harvard Corporation and wealthy benefactors in Boston to persuade them to fund his ambitious museum generously. As his biographer Edward Lurie wrote, “He was respected by the best people, for his ideas of the spiritual quality that pervaded all material creation fitted in perfectly with the conservatism of men like James Walker [the president of Harvard from 1853 to 1860] as well as with the transcendentalism of Emerson” (1960: 213). This combination of reverence, even piety, and transcendental views continued to influence American science in the final decades of the nineteenth century. An important role in the development of this legacy is to be found in the history of the Agassiz Association, founded after his death, but based on his example.

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Figure 14.1 This portrait was included in the Agassiz Association column in many issues of St. Nicholas and as the frontispiece of the Handbook of the Agassiz Association.

The association was founded by Harlan H. Ballard, a teacher at Lenox High School (formerly Lenox Academy) in Lenox, Massachusetts in 1875, as an extension of his science teaching. Ballard was inspired by one of Jacob Abbott’s Rollo Books, Rollo’s Museum, which he recalled from his childhood, more than thirty years later, as still as good a guide as any known to me, to put into the hands of young persons who wish to organize themselves into a society. It was a halfconscious recollection of the pleasure I derived from reading this book when a child, that led me more than ten years ago to propose a similar society to the pupils in the Lenox high school (“History” 1887: 93).2 This science study association expanded exponentially when in 1880, at Ballard’s request, Mary Mapes Dodge offered her support in the form of space

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for a regular column in St. Nicholas Magazine, then the best children’s magazine in America. Ballard explained his choice of Agassiz’s name, referring to his widespread fame, the memory of his then-recent death (in 1873), and the existence of a similar nature study organization in Switzerland. St. Nicholas Magazine was a literary journal perfectly attuned to the values and interests of the upper- and upper-middle class of American society. It was an offspring of Scribner’s Magazine, which funded it generously and which had found, in Mary Mapes Dodge, an editor with the social and editorial skills suited to harness the idealism as well as the pragmatism of the young generations of the Gilded Age. Ballard himself was keenly aware of the need to unite the high rhetoric of Victorian piety and propriety with the justification for the pursuit of scientific knowledge. In his “Invitation” to the readers of St. Nicholas Magazine, the first national publicity about the Agassiz Association, Ballard provided his public rationale for connecting a natural history organization with Louis Agassiz: Not many of you need to be told why we have named our Society THE AGASSIZ ASSOCIATION. There are few that have not heard something of the life and work of that famous man—so universally honored and beloved—Professor Louis Agassiz. In 1846 the great Naturalist left his native Switzerland, made America his home, accepted a Professorship at Harvard College, and built up the greatest school of Natural History in this country. Though one of the most learned, he was also one of the most devout and gentle of men. Within less than a decade, the Association had expanded to include 15,000 students and more than 1,200 local scientific societies.3 The A.A. (as it was abbreviated) stretched from coast to coast, and included chapters in Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Persia, Japan, and Chili (sic). The Association had enlisted the aid of some of the most prominent scientists of the day, such as W.O. Crosby of M.I.T. (who had been a student of Agassiz), to correspond with chapter members, identify specimens, and teach a variety of courses. Members of the Association investigated botany, entomology, mineralogy, archaeology, chemistry, ornithology, lepidopterology, geology, ethnology, and other subjects. However, as important as the enormous popularity of this scientific activity was its driving philosophy. In sympathy with the ideas of Friedrich Fröbel, the German inventor of the kindergarten, who believed in the importance of children’s activity in learning, and in harmony with Thoreau’s ideas about living in nature, a writer in The Century emphasized the experiential dimension of the Agassiz Association, which was in accord with Agassiz’s slogan “Study Nature, not Books”:4 Anything which promises to supplement school training by the development of the observing faculty, merits the hearty sympathy and cooperation of all who are interested in the cause of education. This

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is exactly what the Agassiz Association proposes to do, while, at the same time, it gathers a fund of facts, and affords healthful amusement to the children interested in it. (S.B.H “A Young Folks’ School of Observation” 1882: 153) Ballard was passionately dedicated to this approach to science learning. “Nature must be studied out-of-doors,” he wrote. “Natural objects must be studied from the specimens themselves. The rocks must be broken open, the flowers must be studied as they grow, and animals must be watched as they live freely in their own strange homes” (Three Kingdoms 1888: 34). “Nothing can take the place of personal contact with nature” [Ballard’s own italics] (p. 35). This was entirely in the spirit of Louis Agassiz, who, as his biographer has written, “enlivened his instruction by encouraging students to visit his laboratory, study specimens by themselves, and acquire direct knowledge of nature by excursions through the countryside and to the seashore” (Lurie 1960: 147). Describing his ideas about teaching biology, Ballard wrote: “Whatever the living creature might be whose structure and development was . . . to be considered, I should wish in the hands of every pupil. Whatever organs were to be studied I should wish dissected out by the pupils, if practicable . . . I should not be content with pictures or paper models; though if circumstances forbade anything better, I should welcome these rather than rely upon the text alone” (Science in Secondary Schools 1888: 9). Ballard concluded that, if he were forced to use nothing but a text, he would prefer not to study or to teach at all. In his account of the history of the Association in 1887, Ballard attempted to articulate what bound his (at that date) nearly one thousand loosely affiliated chapters together: It seems at first thought difficult, if not impossible, to suggest any general principle of study that can apply to the whole association, for it is composed of elements so diverse. We are of all ages, of varying capacities and differing desires, living in places widely distant and strangely different. . . . But there is a common ground on which all stand—love for nature, and desire to learn. And there is one principle that underlies and determines the methods of our study. It is this: Nature must be studied from her own book. . . . Forgetting theory and useless wrangling, it is our purpose to see things as they are, and to record them as we see them. (p. 95) Association members were encouraged to venture out on hikes to explore and collect specimens, and to examine their finds closely with their own innate curiosity and intelligence before developing theories or consulting “authorities” about their discoveries. They were tutored in how to build a collection, but their assembled treasures were not supposed to become museums for display only. “Put up a notice ‘Hands on,’ rather than ‘Hands off,’” Ballard

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wrote. “Do not keep your museum simply as an ornament. Study your specimens, and give others a chance to study them” (p. 42).5 Ballard, from the evidence of his writings about teaching, must have been an inspired and inspiring teacher. Some of his passionate commitment to hands-on science education sprang from his experience in an unsatisfactory chemistry course at Williams College. He expressed his keen regret that he had studied “this beautiful science” entirely by listening to lectures, which, even though they were delivered by “one of the very best teachers of chemistry” and accompanied by elaborate daily experiments, proved to Ballard the “futility of attempting to teach chemistry outside the laboratory.” If he and his peers had been able to perform themselves even a fraction of the experiments they witnessed, they would have learned far more chemistry, he believed (Science in Secondary Schools 1880: 10–11). Ballard’s philosophy of science teaching sought to develop in pupils what he called “a cupidity for truth; a love of study; a desire for knowledge; a passion for research; a fondness for investigation; delight in mental activity” (p. 4). “Imbued with a true scientific spirit, he must be trained to the intelligent and patient use of his faculties, especially those known as ‘observation’ and ‘reasoning’” (p. 4). A careful scientific observer himself, Ballard drew no hard lines between scientific observation and aesthetic appreciation or a feeling response to nature. In his account of Mount Greylock in New England Magazine, Ballard could write, “Greylock reigns supreme, robed with ermine snow in winter, and in summer robed with ermine cloud, and crowned by the fires of the lightning,” (1891: 603), but also “Pittsfield rests upon a stratum of limestone, which is from one to two thousand feet in thickness . . . a mass of dark micaceous slate or schist, resting upon it like a pile of sand on a field of snow” (p. 599). He described natural phenomena with the language of both poetry and science. The Agassiz Association was founded with a call to go out of doors and go hiking. The boys and girls of Switzerland, Ballard wrote in his inaugural appearance in St. Nicholas Magazine, gather each year in the spring to go “for a tramp.” He described the vigorous outdoor explorations engaged in by Swiss children, led by the village schoolmaster. Together they would collect “the treasures of the wood” and then eat their picnic meals, after which they would spread out their treasures, compete to see who had collected the most and the rarest, and then challenge the master to name them, “and laugh in mischievous triumph when he fails” (Three Kingdoms 1888: 14). As this detail suggests, one of Ballard’s gifts as a teacher was his ability to maintain a certain detachment about his students’ conclusions, an ability that extended into his activity as a science educator to the nation’s youth. I should avoid, if teaching, the feeling that I must lead the pupils to see in the specimen precisely what I might see there. I have seen teachers oppressed with this notion. Possessed by a certain theory, belief, or dogma, such teachers will not accept cordially any observation by a pupil unless

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it has an obvious tendency to establish the position previously taken by the instructor’s mind (Science in Secondary Schools 1888: 9) This healthy detachment, agnosticism, or freedom from dogma served Ballard well in situating himself in relation to one of the most contentious scientific issues of his day, the theory of evolution. In his most noteworthy departure from Agassiz’s ideas, Ballard sought, by implication, to detach scientific discovery from specific theological conclusions: an evolutionist directing a class to the examination of a lobster rejoices in those pupils who first discover the analogies and homologies which link that creature to the crab, while he is in danger of disparaging observations which may seem to have a tendency to controvert the theory in mind. On the contrary, a teacher committed against evolution might welcome too warmly just those observations which the evolutionist was prone to disregard. (p. 9) The caution against prejudging the evidence expressed here is summarized by Ballard with this principle: “True teachers must let their pupils look through achromatic lenses, not those tinged with their own convictions” (p. 9). One of the ways in which Ballard himself saw through achromatic lenses was that he always assumed that science was a pursuit for both girls and boys. His invitation to the readers of St. Nicholas to join the Agassiz Association evoked an image of “the long golden hair of the girls” of Switzerland, “tightly braided and firmly knotted with gay ribbons” as they “go clambering over rocks . . . and climbing steep cliffs” (Three Kingdoms 1888: 14). Though he often uses the conventional “he” in describing the scientific inquirer, he also writes about “the young men and women [who] will show you collections carefully prepared, accurately labeled, diligently studied, highly valued, and exceedingly valuable” (pp. 16–17). His description of a representative teacher in Three Kingdoms assumes she is a woman: “Every teacher has at some time felt how delightful it would be if she could only lead her pupils to see the inexpressible beauty that lies hid from unawakened eyes in pebble, and leaf, and wing” (p. 17). However, this was by no means true of all the professors Ballard recruited. Marcus E. Jones, distinguished botanist of the West, for example, “was a quintessential egotist and male chauvinist,” as Arthur Cronquist of the New York Botanical Garden has described him. Ballard records in Three Kingdoms that “Dr. Marcus E. Jones, of Salt Lake City, has taken a class through elementary botany,” though one wonders how Jones, who was rumored to have threatened a fellow botanist with a pistol and was known for his bizarre behavior, approached teaching children botany, particularly as he “roamed the West, botanizing everywhere, paying scant attention to his wife and children” (Cronquist 1987: 141). However, there is no reason to think that Jones’s chauvinism was representative of the attitudes of the scientists and teachers

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Ballard recruited on behalf of the Agassiz Association. These included such distinguished scientists as Professor Crosby, whose course in mineralogy was particularly successful. In 1897 Ballard wrote a biographical article about the naturalist Amos Eaton, a fellow resident of Berkshire County and graduate of Williams College, a co-founder of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who “encouraged females to attend his public lectures, and also some of his school lectures” (Rudolph 1996: 663) and he influenced, through his writings or through private tutoring, Emma Willard, Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, and Mary Lyons, who “were instrumental in initiating an American female seminary movement” (p. 663). Eaton may have been a model to Ballard for including girls and women in the pursuit of science. Agassiz’s circle also provided models for co-education. Though Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz’s wife, had been denied formal classroom training in the sciences (Lindsay 1998: 651), she “helped create the women’s annex at Harvard University in 1879, and after 1889 laboratories for physics and chemistry were built there specifically for the Harvard girls” (p. 651). In 1873, Kim Tolley asserts, Louis Agassiz “set a highly publicized stamp of approval on the role of women as teachers of natural history” (2003: 113). He astonished his colleagues, when he inaugurated the Anderson school, by admitting eighteen women, approximately one-third of the student body. He dealt firmly with male student pranksters from Amherst and Harvard who poked fun at the women students: he expelled them promptly. In his Fourth Report in St. Nicholas Magazine, Ballard wrote about the preferred study among the then-thousand members of the Agassiz Association: entomology. Ballard noted that girls and boys were equally enamored of the subject, and he explained its appeal largely through the exotic beauty of butterflies, beetles, moths, and dragonflies, the excitement of the chase, and the fascinating life-cycles of insects (1881: 734). Apparently unaware of any irony, he described how to capture insects: “you will need a light gauze net,” Ballard told his readers. “Any boy can make one of these in half an hour. Get threefourths of a yard of silk veiling; ask Mother to make a bag of it, with a hem around the top wide enough to run a pipe-stem through.” Some of his instructions might make twenty-first-century parents shudder: “To kill insects, provide yourself with a wide-mouthed jar. A candy-jar is good. Lay three or four pieces of cyanide of potassium, the size of a walnut, on the bottom of the inside; pour over these plaster of Paris, made liquid by water, until the lumps of poison are covered. The plaster will quickly harden, leaving a smooth and deadly floor, on which any insect, when dropped, will quickly and quietly pass away.” To prevent the destruction of insect specimens by pests, he advises that “beetles and other small insects should be soaked in a solution of arsenic in alcohol (fourteen grains of arsenic to a pint and a half of alcohol).” Modern parents or teachers might not find their concerns entirely allayed by the reminder, in italics, “Of course, you should ask your parents, or some older

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friend, to attend to these preparations which I have mentioned, as great care is necessary in handling the poisons” (p. 734). One of the goals of the Agassiz Association, a byproduct of collecting, classifying, and reporting about natural specimens, was the skill of writing clearly. Colonel Francis W. Parker, superintendent of the school district in Quincy, Massachusetts and almost certainly an acquaintance of Ballard’s, wrote in 1885, “Botany, zoology, and mineralogy are among the best possible means for the teaching of reading and language, [and] how to speak and write the English language correctly can be taught incomparably better by teaching physics than by using technical grammar” (The School Journal 1885). Of course, natural history research also encouraged and developed the ability to read, as Caroline Maria Hewins (1846–1926), influential children’s librarian from Roxbury, Massachusetts, recalled fondly in 1909 at the ground-breaking Child Conference for Research and Welfare.6 She described the growth and influence of the Agassiz Association in a time before there were library schools: how the A.A. encouraged outdoor exploration, as well as the reading of lives of naturalists such as Thomas Edward, Robert Dick, or Agassiz, and of authors such as John Burroughs, Dr. C.C. Abbott, and Frank Buckland. She clearly took pride in the fact that the children in the Berkshire County chapter “all had good homes, good vocabularies and reading fathers and mothers, and listened with interest to books that are far in advance of the children of their age who began to come to the library after it was made public” (1910: 13). The Agassiz Association was clearly, for Hewins, an important influence in middle-class literacy and character formation. The Agassiz Association was also a training ground for young scientists in a variety of other skills related to research. These skills might be as common as parliamentary procedures or as arcane as transforming a photograph into a black and white illustration suitable for lithographic reproduction, as Dr. R.W. Shufeldt instructed young readers of American Naturalist to do. “The ‘black and white’ figure thus produced can be electrotyped by any of the ordinary methods, at a very moderate cost, and it will make a fair figure to illustrate what the young naturalist may have to say in the journal he subscribes for—as, for instance, the reports of any of the many chapters of the Agassiz Association to President Ballard” (1891: 629). What Ballard envisioned for some members of the Agassiz Association was a career parabola that rose from the frontier to the forefront of American science. He described his vision in Three Kingdoms as follows: A boy in a grammar school in the uttermost parts of Dakota becomes interested in fishes. He finds the common varieties he knows, and studies them. By and by he takes in his net or on his hook a stranger. He finds no account of him in the small zoology in the school library. The teacher cannot help him. He studies the fish with his eyes, examines fins, and scales, and skeleton. Then he prepares a description, as accurately as he

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can, perhaps aided in this by the teacher, and sends it with a rude sketch, it may be, to Dr. Holder, of the New York Central Park, who is one of the gentlemen who kindly assist our students. In a few days he receives a letter, giving him the name of the fish, and, what is better, the name of a book from which he can learn much more about fishes than from any volume that ever before found its way into his village. How he is encouraged by this graceful sympathy! He hoards his earnings till the book is bought. He studies it by candlelight after the chores are done. He masters it, and presents it to his little society, where it becomes the nucleus of a scientific library, which ten years from now may require a building to protect it. By this time this boy has finished school he knows more about the fish in the local waters than his parents or instructors, and he has become fired with ambition to go to some place where he can meet men who know enough to teach him more. He enters a college or higher scientific school, and becomes, before many years are gone, himself a specialist, ready, nay eager, to help other poor boys in other isolated places. This is no fancy sketch, but has been realized over and over again since the Agassiz Association was founded in 1875. (pp.18-19) Ballard’s account of the trajectory of a boy’s scientific interests is both a classic American narrative of social aspiration and ascent, and echoes directly Agassiz’s own life. Though Agassiz was not born to a poor family, his early experiences, particularly his absorbing interest in fish, is mirrored in Ballard’s paradigm. As Agassiz wrote in an autobiographical sketch, My room became a little menagerie, while the stone basin under the fountain in our yard was my reservoir for all the fishes I could catch. Indeed, collecting, fishing, and raising caterpillars, from which I reared fresh, beautiful butterflies, were then my chief pastimes. What I know of the habits of the fresh-water fishes of Central Europe I mostly learned at that time; and I may add, that when afterward I obtained access to a large library and could consult the works of Bloch and Lacépède, the only extensive works on fishes then in existence, I wondered that they contained so little about their habits, natural attitudes, and mode of action with which I was so familiar. (Elizabeth Agassiz 1885: 146) Whether members of A.A. became career scientists or not, Ballard described the advantages to be gained from membership as follows: Habits of observation are formed; valuable knowledge is acquired; spontaneous study is secured; health-giving rambles are taken; the elements of parliamentary law are learned and practiced; subjects for compositions are abundantly supplied; power of debate is attained; practice in letter-writing is necessitated; valuable collections are made;

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useful libraries are founded; pleasant acquaintances are formed; windows are opened into distant States, through which we catch glimpses of scenery new to us; we see various strange forms of animal and plant life; we read fossil records of the past; we become acquainted with modes of thought and expression which prevail outside our own homes. (p. 21) Ballard valued good writing, and was pleased to note in his “Seventh Report” that “I have been extremely pleased by the general excellence of the hundreds of letters which have been sent me by the boys and girls of the A.A. They are, as a rule, well written, carefully spelled and punctuated, and accurately addressed” (St. Nicholas October 1881: 974). Kaye Adkins has admirably explored the ways in which St. Nicholas Magazine promoted its young readers’ interest in and learning about natural history through Mary Mapes Dodge’s commitment to publishing a wide range of scientific articles, essays, and stories, by writers including John Burroughs, Ernest E. Thompson, William Howitt, William Temple Hornaday, and Theodore Roosevelt. Adkins shows how St. Nicholas and the Agassiz Association as well as the league of Bird Defenders worked to prepare its readers for the idea of the preservation of nature. William Temple Hornaday, director of the Bronx Zoo, put earlier natural history articles into a new context when he wrote that these “miscellaneous studies” had suggested that “the animal kingdom is ‘an animated crazy quilt’ when it is, instead, ‘one long, unbroken chain, . . . the unity and beauty of which are seen to be most complete when you follow it up or down, link by link’ (231). This understanding of the connections between all living things, including humans, is central to Hornaday’s articles,” Adkins writes. “These connections are depicted in a series of charts that begin by showing the relationship of natural history to other sciences and end with showing humankind’s relationship to the other primates” (2004: 41). This awareness points forward to twentieth-century concepts of ecology. “Through the natural history articles, St. Nicholas showed children how to observe nature, learn about it, and love it. It provided one of the ‘foundation-stones’ for public acceptance of preservation of the natural world,” Adkins argues (p. 45). Did the Agassiz Association, with its emphasis on collecting “specimens,” encourage what we today would call ecological awareness, or was it part of the rapacious era of collection, which contributed to the extinction of rare species such as the ivory-billed woodpecker? Ballard was emphatic in inveighing against cruelty, even to insects. “Never pass a pin through a living insect,” he wrote (July 1881: 734). Ballard was aware, and sought to make his readers aware, of the dangers to natural life from avid collection of specimens. “By the way, speaking of birds’ nests,” he wrote in September 1881, “the question has been several times sent to me—‘How can I avoid the law that forbids all persons taking the nests or eggs of birds?’ I advise you not to try to avoid it. It is a very wise law, and necessary to protect our singing birds from extermination. Most of you are so much interested in other subjects that you can be quite happy without disturbing

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the homes of the birds” (p. 894). However, he went on to acknowledge that some localities allowed collecting birds’ eggs with a permit, and he cautiously encouraged collection-building through exchanges. Intentionally or not, the A.A. placed great emphasis on collection and the attendant equipment, to an extent that could overshadow the scientific learning that was its intended purpose. The Third Report included an illustration of the “Form of Botany-Box” members might use (an iconic image of the avocation), and included detailed instructions for collecting, pressing, and mounting wild flowers for display. The techniques of capturing wild specimens could be as fascinating as the specimens themselves. The Fourth Report informed readers of a “third method” of capturing moths by “painting trees with a mixture of rum, beer, and sugar” (p. 734). The Association Handbook devoted considerable space to techniques of collection and preservation, and included a section with directions for constructing a cabinet. For the leaders of the Agassiz Association, skills such as carpentry were a natural complement to the pursuit of scientific knowledge. The Agassiz Association represents a chapter in the history of American amateur science, Elizabeth Keeney argues in The Botanizers. She places the A.A. in the context of the “Nature-Study” movement, which “was unabashedly amateur in approach,” in contrast to New Botany, which “attempted to instill professional ideals in amateurs” (1992: 140). However, Ballard’s emphasis on scientific knowledge, nomenclature, and procedures in the handbook of the Agassiz Association, Three Kingdoms, as well as his vision of the trajectory of the diligent investigator of fish cited above indicate that, for Ballard at least, the Association was not merely an amateur pursuit, but rather a project of lifelong learning which might well issue in a professional career and which, at its best, represented rigorous and systematic investigation into natural phenomena. Membership in the Agassiz Association was not limited to children; in fact, a high proportion of members, as Ballard acknowledged with satisfaction, was adult, whether they were parents of readers of St. Nicholas (the Association encouraged so-called “family chapters”) or simply interested adults who found in the Association means of promoting and developing their interests in natural history. The professionalization of science was in progress, not complete: Darwin, the wealthy amateur naturalist, collected an enormous amount of concrete data before he formulated a theory to interpret that data. Contrast this with Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog,” who was an academic scientist, not as interested in the particulars, but dedicated to theory. While the language of the Agassiz Association reports was at times rigorously scientific, at times it was also floridly pious. “It was a dream of Louis Agassiz himself to see American youth early led into the pleasant paths of natural science; to see them forsaking all foolish and wanton sport for the sake of a wise and loving study of the works of God,” Ballard wrote, echoing the Puritan language of his New England antecedents (Three Kingdoms: 17). However, in more detailed accounts of personal contact with nature, the Agassiz Association

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version of “study of the works of God” looks more like pantheism. Clearly Romanticism was in the lineage of the Agassiz Association as well: And if you have ever known what it is to feel a great love for the very earth, so that on some sunny day you have wandered off alone, and under the fragrant shade of an ancient pine, have thrown yourself upon her broad bosom, like a tired child; or if, when the wind was bending the long grass, you have lain among the daisies, like Robert Falconer, watching your kite floating far up in the blue sky, and wondering what there is beyond the kite, and beyond the sky; or if, on some dark day in December, when gray clouds were scurrying across the sky, you have climbed a hill alone, and from a swaying perch in a leafless beach watched the drifting snow as it wrapped the world in ermine—then you may believe that a portion of the spirit that animated Agassiz, and Edward, and Audubon, and White, and Wordsworth, has fallen upon you. (pp. 35–6) Whittier wrote a Romantic poem on “The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz” (May 28, 1867), which was reprinted in Three Kingdoms and elsewhere; it emphasized the role of “Nature, the dear old nurse”. In the view of Elizabeth Keeney, “One of the last strong shows of natural theology occurred in the Agassiz Association, which took as one of its two mottos ‘Per Naturam Ad Deum,’ or ‘Through Nature to God’” (1992: 143). “The Association’s fostering of careful scientific work by amateurs is noteworthy,” Keeney states, but “its nonscientific aims and aspirations are no less interesting. Not the least of these was promoting middle-class values, which had traditional Protestantism as their backbone” (p. 143). “And yet,“ Keeney writes, “despite its adherence to tradition, the Agassiz Association was in one sense very modern—namely the superficiality of its homage to natural theology. While there was no question of the sincerity of the motto, there was also no depth to it. Tips on how to press plants or how to organize a collection were given far more attention than evidences of design or providence. Reports from the chapters talked of how many species had been identified, not the wisdom and power of their Creator. Natural theology was no longer a tool for explanation, but merely an ideal, an underlying set of assumptions” (p. 144). This observation can be seen in several different lights. The pious language of some of the literature of the Agassiz Association may be interpreted as a nod to conventional piety, but also as a means of clothing the founders of modern American science in a reverential atmosphere. The lack of depth of the natural theology expressed by the Agassiz Association can be seen as enabling the passage to modernity, allowing new explanations (such as the theory of evolution) to co-exist with older ones without igniting a battle between traditional institutions and modern science: specifically, to unite in a common pursuit of truth followers of Agassiz, who dogmatically opposed Darwin, with followers of Asa Gray, William Barton Rogers, and other progressive scientists

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receptive to Darwin’s ideas about the origins of species. It may also have cast a legitimizing cloak over the preservationist impulses that St. Nicholas and the Agassiz Association stirred, adding a religious motivation to the drive to protect and preserve the biological world rather than merely to understand it. In this sense, too, the Agassiz Association is very modern: the closest thing to religious teaching to be found in modern public schools is perhaps environmentalism. With the great exception of his closed-mindedness about evolution, which the A.A. did its best to circumvent by emphasizing experience over theory, the legacy of the Agassiz Association is a tradition based on Agassiz’s progressive ideas about science study. Notes 1

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In November of 1859, Charles Darwin wrote to Agassiz: “I have ventured to send you a copy of my Book . . . on the origin of species. As the conclusions at which I have arrived on several points differ so widely from yours, I have thought (should you at any time read my volume) that you might think I had sent it . . . out of a spirit of defiance or bravado; but I assure you that I act under a wholly different frame of mind. I hope that you will at least give me credit, however erroneous you may think my conclusion, for having carefully endeavored to arrive at the truth” (Agassiz Papers, Houghton Library; cited in Lurie 1960: 253–4). It is doubtful that Agassiz gave Darwin such credit; in the margins of Darwin’s book, he wrote “This is truly monstrous!” and later “What is the great difference between supposing that God makes variable species or that he makes laws by which species vary?” (p. 255). See Ballard’s account of the early history of the Association, in which he records its origins as a high school scientific society, in which recording weather data, collecting specimens, and studying natural phenomena such as tree rings played a role (“History” 1887: 93). Kim Tolley notes that “By the 1890s, it numbered more than 20,000 young members in 1,200 chapters across the country” (2003: 130). Tolley describes the influence of Colonel Francis Wayland Parker, superintendent of the school district in Quincy, Massachusetts, who synthesized and popularized the ideas of Friedrich Fröbel, Johann Friedrich Herbart and Johann Pestalozzi, who “stressed the importance of sense perception, verification, and original research through the direct observation and study of nature” (2003: 132). Parker wrote in 1885, “Botany, zoology, and mineralogy are among the best possible means for the teaching of reading and language” (The School Journal 1885). Fröbel had emphasized the direct aesthetic and scientific exploration of nature: “Memories from my youth: gazing at tulips with unutterable delight. Intense pleasure in their regular forms. The striking pattern of the six petals and the three-edged seed pods . . . Joyful contemplation of the hazel catkin with its delightful colours. . . .

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Dissecting beans at Oberweissbach in the hope of finding an explanation” (Kuntze 1952: 13). Chapter 11 of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men (1871) features a similar museum, suggested by “Mr. Laurie,” Jo’s friend, who proposes “a place in which to collect all the curious and interesting things that you find, and make, and have given you.” Alcott had a life-long inclination to use flowers in particular for symbolic purposes, as attested in her early work Flower Fables. Mary Peabody Mann published a highly popular horticultural guide for children, The Flower People: Being an Account of the Flowers by Themselves. Sybille Jagusch contends that Hewins and Anne Carroll Moore (1871–1961) were “first among equals: they were the main leaders in a group of likeminded children’s library women who adopted the service philosophy of the American Library Association and created and institutionalized library work with children as it still exists today” (Dissertation abstract). DAI 51, no. 05A (1990): p. 1428.

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Chapter Fifteen Good Masters: Child–Animal Relationships in the Writings of Mark Twain and G. Stanley Hall Joan Menefee

One thing I have frequently observed in children, that when they have got possession of any poor creature, they are apt to use it ill: they often torment, and treat very roughly, young birds, butterflies, and such other poor animals which fall into their hands, and that with a seeming kind of pleasure. (John Locke 1692)

If We Could Talk to the Animals In the autobiography he published a year before his death, The Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (1923), G. Stanley Hall, the foremost American authority on child psychology of the late nineteenth century, speaks of a boyhood rich in animals. Hall moved between barn, pasture and wood on his family’s Massachusetts farm, steadily absorbing knowledge of animal gestures and habits. “All of us children,” he writes, “perhaps I most, were always greatly interested in animals. Not only the horses but the cows and some of the sheep received names, and the faces of even the latter, perhaps twenty or thirty in number, were not only distinguished and recognized but felt to be very indicative of character” (p. 89). Hall details wild animals—rats, crows, skunks, muskrats, pigeons, hawks, squirrels, even a lynx—as meticulously as domestic ones, concluding that taken together, his interspecies encounters laid “the foundations . . . for my subsequent interest in animals and comparative psychology, which has prompted various experiments by myself and by my students in later years and on which subject I have for years given lectures” (p. 95). 227

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Hall’s boyhood pursuits influenced his scientific work on a few levels. First, he realized a love for the natural world as he practiced the art of observation; tending to and playing with animals fell on a single spectrum. His boyhood experience, coupled with his adult reading of Charles Darwin’s arguments about the proximate and contingent mental and morphological relationships among all animals in On the Origin of Species (1859), The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions of Man and Animals (1872), confirmed his belief that animal gestures resembled those of human children.1 Both groups spoke through movement. This conceptual link encouraged Hall to seek meaning in the nonverbal language of children, a realm most scientists ignored. The meaning of the gestural language of childhood, in Hall’s view, could be derived through observing children’s relationships with animals, much as he had examined his own such relationships. Furthermore, because he embraced a recapitulationist and neo-Lamarckian (and therefore teleological and linear) theory of speciation, Hall believed that human children must progress through prior stages of species development in order to achieve their humanity, mimicking and mastering the languages of other animals on the road to knowing their own. In Manliness and Civilization, Gail Bederman writes that it is difficult “to overstate how literally Hall applied recapitulation theory” (1995: 94). Understanding the literalness of nineteenth-century comparative animal studies helps us put Hall’s scientific program in perspective. He was no outlier in academe. As Cynthia Eagle Russett demonstrates in Darwin in America, “Lamarckianism offered, as Darwinism did not, firm scientific support for the efficacy of education in improving humanity” (1976: 10). The old-fashioned punitive, authoritarian model of education—personified by Dickens’ Master Squeers of Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby (1839), or closer to home and more contemporaneously with Hall, by Mr. Grimshaw in Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy (1869)—degraded the species by reproducing stagnant, violent hierarchies. Systemic improvement depended on the successful completion of two tasks: gathering data on child behavior and using it to build and staff good schools, all for the betterment of the species. Linking the observation of nature and the pursuit of liberal democratic educational reforms, or knowing animals and teaching humans, put cutting-edge science in the service of social advancement. Interpreting gestural languages, however, is tricky, especially when the “speaker” does not confirm or deny the validity of the observer’s interpretation. How does one master such languages? How can scientists, teachers, and parents direct this learning process? Or can outsiders, people who perceive themselves as having successfully ascended the evolutionary ladder, direct the process at all? In this chapter, I examine the work of two influential and popular figures of the late nineteenth century, Mark Twain and G. Stanley Hall. As I demonstrate, each man struggled to understand children’s relationships with animals and what these relationships portended for humanity. I proceed chronologically,

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beginning with an excerpt from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), continuing with articles from G. Stanley Hall’s journal Pedagogical Seminary, and concluding with Twain’s “A Dog’s Tale” (1903), a story which nearly coincides with the last major animal study reported in Pedagogical Seminary. These texts teach us how children of this period purportedly developed ideas about character by interacting with animals, how adults used children and animals to create narratives of personal development, and how a popular form of “Darwinian”2 theory encouraged both adults and children to communicate with each other by manipulating their sentient and nonhuman counterparts. Of Cats and Curiosity Like G. Stanley Hall’s autobiography, Mark Twain’s account of his childhood contains evocative references to fauna, wild and domestic. In his Autobiography, Twain dreamily describes “the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep woods . . . the far-off hammering of woodpeckers and the muffled drumming of wood pheasants in the remoteness of the forest, the snapshot glimpses of disturbed wild creatures scurrying through the grass” (1719: 4). Twain’s mother, Jane Clemens, bitterly opposed animal cruelty, and that, too, figures prominently in the Autobiography. Twain recalls her seizing the whip from a cart man abusing his horse, after which she berated the cart man until he promised never again to harm the creature (p. 27). Twain concludes That sort of interference in behalf of abused animals was a common thing with her all her life. . . . By some subtle sign the homeless, hunted, bedraggled and disreputable cat recognized her at a glance as the born refuge and champion of his sort—and followed her home. His instinct was right; he was as welcome as the prodigal son. We had nineteen cats at one time, in 1845. And there wasn’t one in the lot that had any merit; except the cheap and tawdry merit of being unfortunate. They were a vast burden to us all—including my mother—but they were out of luck, and that was enough; they had to stay. However, better these than no pets at all; children must have pets; and we were not allowed to have caged ones. (pp. 27–8) Twain’s recollection begs a question G. Stanley Hall addressed in his research: why must children have pets? The answer? Along with sharpening observation skills, pets taught children about power. Jane Clemens confronted injustice, defying traditional gender norms, because she was secure in the rightness of her cause: humans had a responsibility to protect animals weaker than they. By identifying and learning to manage animals, children mastered their base instincts. They learned the “subtle sign[s]” underpinning adult worldly knowledge.

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Seventeenth-century Christian philosopher René Descartes is widely credited with influencing educated early modern assumptions about animals; in Discourse on Method (1637) he stresses that the rigid workings of instinct reduce animals to organic machines of solely material value (Carson 1972: 35–9; Mason 1993: 37–8). In contrast, John Locke’s educational writings near the end of the seventeenth century suggest pet ownership might have pedagogical value. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1692), Locke presents animals as an accessible form of property from which children might infer facts about the world; children who learned to regard animals benevolently could make the world “much quieter and better natured than it is”(p. 305). Thus, he remarks with some ambivalence children’s tendency toward animal cruelty, indicating it should be monitored but not necessarily prevented lest their minds become hardened (p. 305). Locke’s philosophy did not confer moral value on animals, but it paved the path for such a paradigm by implying that the way a man treated animals provided a window into his character and education. In the eighteenth century, the implications of mutually defining human–animal relationships were worked out by naturalists, economists, and moral philosophers (Carson 1972: 46–9). Not until the nineteenth century did a sentimentalist view such as Jane Clemens’—regarding kind treatment of animals as indispensable to human moral development—become part of mainstream opinion. While in Locke’s era, animals stood apart from humans cognitively, morally, and ontologically, in later centuries, partly due to the popularization of Darwin’s evolutionary framework, human and nonhuman animals came to be seen as constitutionally similar in terms of emotions and, to some extent, intellect. Though On the Origin of Species strongly implied the filiation of species, Darwin did not describe cross-species (including human) similarities of vocal and gestural expression forthrightly until 1872 in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (pp. 10–13, 42, 347–66). The biological and expressive proximity of humans and other animals made possible a notion of interspecies moral reciprocity. Darwin’s theories unsettled customary ideas about affiliation and affinity, knocking dogs down the Great Chain of Being beneath apes, thereby placing the emotional and genetic ties of the middle class at odds.3 Given Twain’s significant childhood experiences with animals, it comes as little surprise that human/animal interactions figure frequently in his fiction. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), dumb animals teach, are taught, and provide an expressive medium through which Tom Sawyer communicates with others. Beyond exploiting the comic possibilities of animal–human interaction, Twain presents a boy mastering social and physical environments not by brute force, but through interpretation. The beginning of Chapter 12, “The Cat and the Painkiller,” finds Tom’s spirits lowered by Becky Thatcher’s absence from school. Aunt Polly gives him “all manner of remedies” advertised in her magazines (p. 107). Seeing no change in Tom’s condition, she graduates to “Painkiller,” a noxious brew for which the boy disingenuously proclaims grateful fondness (p. 109). When Peter the Cat

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happens by, Tom disposes of the unwanted medicine in a way that allows him to demonstrate his powers of interpretation. Peter purred, eyeing the teaspoon avariciously, and begging for a taste. Tom said: “Don’t ask for it unless you want it, Peter.” But Peter signified that he did want. “You better make sure.” Peter was sure. (p. 109) The humanizing gestures in this passage are manifold. The cat bears a human name that elevates him in readers’ eyes by giving him a familiar, individual identity. In the context of that identity, Peter’s avaricious narrowing of his eyes is as comprehensible as one human’s nonverbal gestures to another. We, therefore, feel a kinship with Peter, a kinship that becomes torturous as we recognize the inevitability of what follows. Tom assaults Peter, prying his mouth open and pouring down the “Painkiller” (pp. 109–10). Peter, for his part, trashes Aunt Polly’s sitting room in a florid and frenetic physical language: “a few double somersaults,” “a final mighty hurrah,” and a leap “through the open window, carrying the . . . flowerpots with him” (p. 110). What is barely visible in a human—the discomfort Aunt Polly’s medicine causes Tom—becomes manifest in the animal’s agitation. The “Painkiller” scene mocks the sentimentalist notion that the ability to feel for others is necessarily a guide to proper moral action. When Aunt Polly interrogates Tom about Peter’s wild performance, the boy translates animal “speech,” affirming his expertise in the language of gesture. Tom claims “‘cats always act so when they’re having a good time’” (p. 111). Aunt Polly, however, is dubious. When she finds the spoon Tom used to medicate Peter, she raises Tom by the ear and demands, “’Now, Sir, what did you want to treat that dumb beast so for?’” (p. 111). Aunt Polly is gap-jawed when Tom says that “I done it out of pity for him—because he hadn’t any aunt . . . if he’d ‘a’ had one she’d ‘a’ burnt him out herself! She’d ‘a’ roasted his bowels out of him ’thout any more feeling than if he was human!” (p. 111). Twain shows readers that Tom’s pity has been warped by his aunt’s ignorance, highlighting the dubious advantage of being a human child in Aunt Polly’s household. Tom’s speech and actions force Aunt Polly to question her belief that Tom is too young to care for himself, that as an adult she is superior to him mentally and morally, and that boys are by nature simple-minded and cruel. Polly realizes that “what was cruelty to a cat might be cruelty to a boy, too” (p. 111, italics Twain’s). Twain suggests that though Aunt Polly enjoys many intellectual and economic advantages over young Tom, she cannot separate truth from falsehood, value from confidence games, or benefit from harm. Though her heart is in the right place, her powers of interpretation are weak. Tom’s horror at having “Painkiller” forced down his throat is legible in Peter’s wild dance; at the same time, Peter’s visible suffering becomes the occasion of

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Polly’s remorse. She only discerns the effects of her cruelty when they are translated into the cat’s movements. If Tom had merely said he didn’t like the medicine, she would have forced him to drink anyway, taking his distaste for the medicine as a sign of its value. In “The Cat and the Painkiller,” Twain demonstrates a paradoxical by-product of our evolutionary, social, and developmental hierarchies: we disbelieve those beneath us because our power over them causes us to rely more on our convictions than our senses. Animals’ inability to speak means that they cannot dissemble, that their witness is pure, and their innocence unimpeachable. Thus, though Twain deemed Tom Sawyer a thoroughgoing “boy’s book,” the novel also serves as moral instruction for adults, who see their struggle for power and interpretive competence in both Tom and Aunt Polly. Of Pets and Pity Tom’s treatment of Peter would fuel a rousing debate about the value of pet ownership for children in any era.4 In late-nineteenth-century America, Peter’s trials formed part of a comic set piece that never disappeared from the literary tradition, but which was joined by a more reciprocal view of animal– human relationships that emerged over the thirty years following Tom Sawyer’s publication. The Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) and its offshoot the Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ASPCC) were formed by Henry Bergh—the ASPCA in 1866, the ASPCC in 1874— and modeled on the British Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded in 1824. In 1874, Bergh took an abused girl named Mary Ellen Wilson into his custody under the auspices of a special writ of habeas corpus based on animal protection laws (Marshall 1910: 215). Offshoots of both organizations emerged nationwide.5 As early animal rights advocate George T. Angell observed, an obligation to raise public awareness of animal abuse stems from the fact that they “have no power of complaint,” a notion he may have gleaned from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Rights of Dumb Animals,” which was published in 1869 (McCrea 1910: 12; Grier 2006: 167). Nineteenth-century demographics may have made changing human–animal relationships inevitable, for rural depopulation estranged more and more humans from traditions interactions with animals.6 By the early 1900s, as G. Stanley Hall’s autobiography confirms, animals and humans laboring together in the outdoors had grown rarer and pet keeping—a surrogate for milking cows and hunting raccoons—had become a familiar middle-class activity. Katherine Grier’s history of pet keeping in the United States, which draws primarily on documents and evidence from the nineteenth century, charts the progress of “the new language of regard” concerning companion animals (2006: 14). “Increasingly,” Grier writes, “the domestic ethic of kindness promoted pet keeping as both a crucial part of childhood and a form of self-expression for adults” (p. 14).

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G. Stanley Hall and C.E. Browne’s “The Cat and the Child,” published in Hall’s Pedagogical Seminary in 1904, defends the value of this practice to those remaining skeptics. Far from being a mere distraction for children, Hall and Browne argue that contact with animals is crucial for children because it enables them to rehearse prior stages of humanity’s development as they struggle for full civilization. Hall and Browne attempt to give these assertions empirical authority, this essay and its companion “Cyno-psychoses” by Fowler Bucke (1903) having been based upon responses to hundreds of questionnaires distributed throughout New England. Their research therefore privileges the voices of middle-class children whose parents had leisure to monitor their development. From their questionnaire data, Hall and Browne deduce that “the majority of the younger children have perfect faith that in its own way the cat does talk and expresses sentiments which the child regards as similar to his own”(p. 15). In this finding, we see the Darwinian perception that drove not only Hall’s research but also the comic insight Twain brought to his portrait of Tom Sawyer: human–animal similitude implies their languages are mutually intelligible. In Hall’s view, children’s minds developed through interpretation of their pets’ movements and expressions. Imagining the thoughts and feelings of animals, therefore, was an overlooked step in children’s social and mental development; contact with domesticated animals introduced children to the structures of mastery. Once children grew accustomed to the structures of mastery, they possessed tools for overcoming their base instincts. In a nutshell, self-mastery depends on mastering others, and self-knowledge depends on understanding others. These conceptual liaisons raise complex questions about how anthropomorphic logic influenced nineteenth-century thought. Indeed, Hall was arguing that human development depended in part on forging mental and emotional connections with animals, a move that might just as easily have been seen to invite regression, not advancement.7 If children were impressionable, common wisdom dictated animal wildness would pervert their characters. After all, so-called primitive cultures teemed with animals, and civilization seemed predicated on resistance to instinct. Hall, however, saw the morphological parallels among species as psychologically significant. Imputing human meaning and motive to animals, the very definition of anthropomorphism, was for Hall both natural and necessary. In “The Cat and the Child,” Hall and Browne point out that “[t]he child’s anthropomorphizing of his cat is twofold. Beside the projection of his own intelligence, his relation to his parents suggests to him a similar relation as existing between the pet and himself” (p. 17). A sense of mutuality is a necessary but not sufficient condition of interpretive mastery. Animals—sentient “others” endowed with eye, voice, and a capacity for self-propelled movement—compel children to solve problems and make connections. At the same time, perceiving animals as learning tools relegates them to a subordinate role and confirms their essential inferiority in a self-evidently hierarchical world.

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Hall’s contentions about comparative animal psychology stemmed from his belief that challenging circumstances enable optimal development. The combination of the animal’s capacity for movement, which makes it not entirely predictable, and its muteness, which requires children to venture interpretations of those movements, propel children from passivity into activity. Here again, we see evidence of Hall’s recapitulationist interpretation of Darwin’s work: children must proceed along a fixed linear path. Sentimental identification with animals has no lasting value, as it seems to have for Jane Clemens; for Hall it is chiefly a means to self-mastery. To be active respondents to an animate material environment, children must impose human verbal meaning upon unintelligible animal noises. The researchers report that children suppose their cats swear “in cat language,” just as Tom Sawyer parsed Peter’s purring (p. 16). Children also routinely interpret dogs’ facial expressions to discern mental states (Bucke 1903: 482–8). Pet ownership thereby sharpens children’s perceptual capacities: Hall and Browne assert that “[o]ne very marked feature of the child’s reaction to the general activities of his pet cat is the importance he attaches to the most insignificant positions and actions; only a passing glance at the things which the child records with such exactness is required to demonstrate that the child is a most minute observer of movement and spatial position” (1904: 12). For children, anthropomorphic interpretation becomes automatic. The duality of their self-regard—as animal and more-than-animal—emerges in their assessments of what pets teach them. Referring repeatedly to the muteness of dogs, they claim to have learned to “be kind to all dumb animals,” “to be good to dumb animals,” and above all “to have patience” with them (Bucke 1903: 508). In these examples, children take muteness as a sign of purity, recognizing an ability and duty to offer their voices to innocent beings.8 This offering, which initially looks like self-abnegation, is also a systematic means of self-making, since it is predicated on appropriative strategies of self-identification. According to Hall and his colleagues, mastering animal languages benefits children emotionally as well as morally and mentally. One adult female respondent writes that her dog did her much good “in that when I reached the age when I lost confidence in human beings, I carried all my joys and sorrows to her, and she was at one time, to my thinking, my only true friend” (Bucke 1903: 497). An eleven-year-old girl expresses a similar sentiment: “Keeps me company when I haven’t anyone to play with. She is just like a sister” (p. 496). Kinship becomes an acquired as well as biological relationship. Dogs provide support when humans isolate or fail one another. In this sense, dogs are key, if subordinate, members of the human social structure. When children discuss the difficulties their pets have faced, they move from identification to compassion, following a progression Hall believes parallels humanity’s pre-history—from self-interested to other-directed, or from egotistical to social. Hall, Bucke, and Browne all declare that pets make excellent training subjects because animal care draws children outward. Mastery does not

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derive simply from the fact of ownership, or even from the connection that familiarity engenders. The researchers suggest that emotional investment in animal others is a crucial step in civilization. Fowler Bucke puts it this way: The responsibility for the conduct of the dog, the desire to make him an agreeable element of society and home, the pleasure arising from his ability to do “intelligent” acts, and the use that can be made of him in various ways through training, are strong motives inducing the children to interest in his intellectual and moral development. Aside from the children who derived their development through experience, and the efforts of their parents, there is little doubt that the dog was the next to be trained. (p. 506) Bucke’s reasons for believing children might take interest in animal training are focused on the concept of integration; children integrate pets into families, as children themselves must be integrated into human social order. He arranges his reasons progressively, moving from making the dog safe to bring among strangers to enabling her to perform on command, ending with the animal’s apotheosis as a useful being. The pleasure of teaching derives from reflected glory and also from the pupil’s special bond with his teacher. The well-trained animal attests the child’s growth. Bucke implies the mutuality of this process in the last sentence of the above passage by switching the subject and object of instruction; the animal is the “next to be trained” as the orderly progression of a child’s education makes him into a master. The pet is teaching tool and student. Bucke, in keeping with Twain’s dramatic techniques in Tom Sawyer, claims that pet training is also theatrical. Parents may demonstrate the results of incompliant behavior upon dogs, making a serious impression upon children who witness this punishment (p. 492). Parameters of behavior are thereby set without violence to the children. By the same token children can show their parents the results of their custodianship, negative or positive, through their treatment of pets. In Tom Sawyer’s “care” of Peter, a moral world becomes visible. Hypocrisy, magazine advertisements, and half-baked science make cruelty legitimate. In the Pedagogical Seminary testimony, children’s tendency toward cruelty seems to have been overcome. Because pets are central to domestic education, they effectively take on a third role, beyond that of teaching tool and student: pets serve as expressive mediums. Children, by interpreting their pets’ attitudes and gestures, articulate their feelings to their keepers. Explanations of misbehavior take on larger meanings: a girl of nine writes that her dog “does not know the difference between right and wrong because he is not big enough”; a boy of twelve states that after being punished, his dog “comes along with his paws and puts them in my hand. He wants me to forgive him for what he has done”; another girl says that “[t]here is always such a penitent look in [her dog’s] large brown eyes,

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one finds it almost impossible to punish him for his faults” (p. 492). In these cases, children are talking about themselves and their dogs simultaneously—an inexperienced, injured offender and a forgiving master—as they narrate emotional encounters. They translate the shorthand of gesture (paws proffered, eyes downcast or wide with remorse) and so express a burgeoning and interpreting self—one seeking fluency, one readily offering pity, and one ready to follow social rules. Or so Hall wishes to persuade readers. Children’s mimicry of their parents could just as easily signify parental tyranny. Law giving, however, has a dark side that Hall and Browne seek to integrate into their pedagogical theory. Children inflict cruelty unconnected to wrongdoing on animals. As mastery encourages generous and compassionate regard, it entails license to control property; a master is entitled to experiment with different methods of punishment to find the most effective. In “Curiosity and Interest,” published in 1903, Hall and another partner, Theodate L. Smith, acknowledge this phenomenon as a component of curiosity consonant with children’s desire to see the inner workings of objects. The researchers write: The desire to touch and handle things at this age [three to six] is so great that we have numerous instances of seeds regularly dug up to watch their growth, flower buds picked or blown open, and the eyes of puppies and kittens rudely exposed to light before the proper time, as well as numerous other attempts to assist nature in ways which, though detrimental to her processes, are, nevertheless, inspired by a genuine though mistaken zeal for finding out her ways. (p. 326) Hall and Smith attribute much childhood cruelty to ignorance. Children’s experiments reported in the questionnaires include amputating frog’s legs, cutting a crow’s tongue “to find out whether it would learn to talk,” and breaking chicken’s legs several times—the final act valorized in the eyes of the parent by the fact that the boy “became a surgeon” (p. 331). Hall and Smith accept these forms of experimentation because they feature children as agents, dismantling objects instead of falling under their rule, as Hall elsewhere argues other animals, governed by instinct, are bound to do. Another form of animal cruelty results from children’s understanding of their role as teacher. Pets, like children, must be punished for failing to learn their lessons. The questionnaire respondents report occasional dog whippings. One woman says, “[I u]sed to think my dog was wicked and would beat him, but before I got half through I would cease, and hug and kiss him” (Bucke 1903: 507). The ambivalence of this statement helps us to understand the incoherence of popular middle-class positions on social issues as varied as eugenics, immigration, and vivisection: while good citizens pitied and embraced the mentally ill, nonwhites, poor immigrants and animals as individuals, it was more difficult to embrace the marginalized in groups. In sentimentalist science, moral and

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biological judgments are indistinguishable. As personal encounters with the groups diminished, however, moments of remorse, such as that described above, became fewer. The Pedagogical Seminary findings about childhood pet ownership suggest that normal development requires systematic mastering of the natural world, especially of instinct. Hall and his colleagues argued that humans must acknowledge and embrace their primitive history in order to transcend it. Familiarity with animals naturalizes the control children exercise over their environment. Humans embrace animals as they embrace instincts: to find the measure of dominion. This dynamic might be viewed as the sentimentalism Aunt Polly displays at the beginning of “The Cat and the Painkiller” chapter of Tom Sawyer, one rooted more in authoritarianism than altruism. For Mark Twain already in 1876, this tendency merited satire. In 1903, at the same time the Pedagogical Seminary cadre was publishing its findings about children and pets, Twain once again explored animal–human relationships. This work, even more than Tom Sawyer, was influenced by the presence of companion animals in middle-class American homes. Of Scientists and St. Bernards In the last decade of his life, Mark Twain embraced anti-vivisectionism, a development that stemmed from his mother’s inculcation, his daughter Jean’s enthusiasm for animal rights, and his own convictions about the ills of sociability and humanity.9 Regarding the body of Twain’s work, one gets the impression that he, like many turn-of-the-century Americans, preferred dogs and horses to people. Degeneration, a widespread American concern of this period, seems to haunt him (Smith 1997: 536). His writings, including the story I examine below, suggest that he felt humans erred in regarding themselves above other animals. He regarded speech not as proof of humanity’s superiority but as a means to self-delusion. Scientists, moreover, were peculiarly vulnerable to this tendency. Why? Because they conflated their detachment from physical things, from things children valued, with development itself. “A Dog’s Tale” (1903), published both in Harper’s Magazine and as a freestanding tract by the National Antivivisection Society, is the story of the dog Aileen Mavoureen (Mason 2005: 25). Aileen’s human name, similar to Peter’s in Tom Sawyer, both reflects common pet naming practices10 and blurs divisions between humans and animals. Aileen is an individual whose life begins and ends, and whose motives, cares and quirks are familiar. The story begins, “My father was a St. Bernard, my mother was a collie, but I am a Presbyterian” (DT: 489). First-person narration, which encourages reader identification across species lines, was common to animal advocacy literature of this period (Grier 2006: 175–6). Early on, Aileen is torn from her mother’s side and sent to live with the Gray family, which is headed by a “renowned scientist” (DT: 490). She saves the scientist’s child from a fire, suffers frequent abuse at her master’s hand, and bears

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a puppy that becomes a subject of her master’s experiments (pp. 488–97). It is not a comic story, despite its jaunty opening. Because Twain wrote “A Dog’s Tale” to protest invasive animal experimentation, he indicts scientists strongly, largely through manipulation of anthropomorphic identification. Aileen the dog is more sympathetic than her scientist-owner. Her first and last name are given, while he is known only by title and last name (“Mr. Gray”); she is aligned with the women and children of the family, while he is isolated in his laboratory (a word Aileen mocks as she mocks a host of big words); her actions are gentle and beneficial, while his are gruff and harmful. She expresses her feelings plainly, with frequent references to the heart, while he swears and screams. Sentimental rhetorical techniques emphasizing guilelessness and transparency usually deployed in describing children are here applied to animals, creating consanguinity. The signal fault of Mr. Gray is that he cannot interpret animal gestures correctly—Aunt Polly’s old sin. In the first instance, the scientist maims the good-hearted Aileen, misinterpreting her hold on his baby as predatory. As Aileen explains “I dragged the screaming little creature along and out the door and around the bend of the hall, and was still tugging away, all excited and happy and proud, when the master’s voice shouted, ‘Begone you cursed beast!’”(p. 493). Aileen testifies feelings (excitement, happiness and pride) that contradict Mr. Gray’s perceptions (hunger and brutishness). In Aileen’s mouth, words such as “creature” and “beast,” which do not denote a single species, erase the line between animal and human in the story, to redraw them in moral rather than biological terms. Like kinship in the Pedagogical Seminary questionnaire responses, humaneness is earned not acquired. Only innocent daughter Sadie can coax Aileen back to the family, because only she has the ability to salve the harm her father’s confusion has caused Aileen. Later, the scientist mortally blinds Aileen’s puppy to prove a theory about optics—another ironic comment about perception (p. 496). Twain writes: “And one day those men came again, and said, now for the test, and they took the puppy to the laboratory. . . . They discussed and experimented, and then suddenly the puppy shrieked, and they set him on the floor, and he went staggering around, with his head all bloody, and the master clapped his hands and shouted: ‘There, I’ve won—confess it! He’s blind as a bat’”(p. 496) (see figure 15.1). Readers likely feel helpless disgust at Mr. Gray’s competitive ejection when the blind puppy expires “its velvet nose rest[ing] on the floor,” never to move or gesture again (p. 496). Though we have seen how sentimentalism sometimes proves problematic because it encourages people to impose their interpretations onto mute bystanders, here we see that this rhetorical tool can be used to mobilize the public against what some considered wanton cruelty. In Twain’s hands, “the genuine though mistaken zeal” to find out nature’s ways is malign, as is unwillingness or inability to understand the language of gesture. At the end of “A Dog’s Tale,” Aileen is slowly dying of a broken heart. Though she doesn’t understand that her child/puppy has died, she intuits the perma-

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Figure 15.1: “They Discussed and Experimented”: frontispiece, Mark Twain’s “A Dog’s Tale.” Illust. W.T. Smedley. N.Y. and London: Harper & Brothers, 1904.

nence of death from the servants who “said things I could not understand” which “carried something cold to my heart” (p. 497). Twain deploys anthropomorphism and sentimentalism—emphasizing the damage indifferent science has done to Aileen’s most precious organ—to prod readers into questioning scientific authority, as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin engendered the questioning of political authority more than half a century before.11 Not nearly as optimistic about the power of scientific inquiry to derive truth as G. Stanley Hall, Twain concludes his tale with Aileen waiting vainly for the return of her little one, whom she believes will grow like a flower in the plot where he is buried. Whereas Peter’s discomfort in Tom Sawyer was comic, didactic, and temporary, here cruelty to an animal fails to teach. The scientist, unchanged morally or intellectually, continues to rule his household, untroubled by Aileen’s loss.

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G. Stanley’s Web By the time he wrote his autobiography, G. Stanley Hall was at the end of a career that would be mercilessly reassessed after his death. Behaviorists took issue with his methods and results, declaring his work profoundly “unscientific” (Berliner 1993: 6). Subsequent generations emphasized his interest in eugenics and the paltriness of his publication. In light of changing animal–human relationships in early twentieth-century America, however, Hall’s displacement becomes more than a garden-variety tale of an old scientist overcome by innovation and the march of history. For unlike many American scientists of the early twentieth century, Hall rarely engaged in laboratory experimentation, preferring instead to compile questionnaire data, lecture teachers and mothers, and popularize theories of European scientists. In this sense, he little resembles the puppy-bludgeoning scientist of “A Dog’s Tale.” His penchant for presenting scientific theories so that the public, especially women, felt comfortable discussing them, in fact, seems to have contributed to the eventual repudiation of his peers. He did not distance himself from nonprofessionals and their messy, anecdotally driven assessments of experience; he camped out among them. His lack of resemblance to Twain’s antagonist-scientist, oddly enough, was the problem, and it has made understanding his intellectual and cultural legacy difficult. Twain and Hall shared the power and burden of popularizing knowledge that originated in isolated scientific communities.12 Their ability to teach the middle-class ensured that some form of this knowledge would alight on the consciousness of everyday America. But their sometimes-imperfect understandings of scientific theories influenced the reliability of these transmissions. Species variation becomes strangely teleological; animal minds seem indistinguishable from their human-owners. Popularization depends on a widespread and immediate sense of recognition; people more readily adopt new ideas if they see a clear relationship between these ideas and their lives, and if they feel the urgency of that connection. Sentimental expressive strategies provided such a conduit in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Only slowly did a tension between the accuracy of an idea’s transmission and the breadth of its renown emerge. As sentimental interpretations of species relationships were gradually denigrated as backward and unscientific ways of understanding the world, stories about animal–human relationships were relegated to the cultural margins. Affirming the border between popular and elite cultures, as modernist critics and historians did during the early twentieth century, was largely a process of erasing sentimentalism and anthropomorphism from the cultural memory. This erasure can render a body of work incoherent, as privileging The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as Mark Twain’s only work of enduring value does. Or it can result in the reintroduction of old ideas—the pedagogical value of pet keeping—as brand-new ones.13 Most significantly, this erasure distorts our

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ability to see how similar our habits of perception are to those of prior generations. In our own era, there remains a tendency to regard sentiment as weak. Despite this perception, contemporary critics have documented and theorized the philosophy’s effects on American political and literary culture.14 Likewise, anthropomorphism is experiencing a renaissance.15 We continue to ask how and why we join with others; and we also wonder what those bonds mean. As the now centuries-long presence of pets in American homes makes questions of animal euthanasia and neglect more complex and the definition of childhood continues to mutate, issues of mastery and responsibility will inevitably grow more pressing. Notes 1

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For the sake of philosophical consistency, I should write “nonhuman animal” here and elsewhere in this chapter. This is a clunky phrase, however. Where I write “animal” throughout this text, “nonhuman animal,” as opposed to “human animal,” is implied. “Darwinian” appears in scare quotes because from most historians’ and scientists’ points of view, these beliefs were not truly Darwinian. Hall called himself Darwinian, but his beliefs do not conform to widespread definitions of the term. Twain’s view of these issues was notoriously plastic and therefore hard to pin down. This much is known. He read The Descent of Man (Twain 1959: 97), and met Darwin at Darwin’s lake home in August 1879 (Rasmussen 1995: 106). For more on the issue of “Darwinisms,” see Morss, (1990: 1–9; 24–5; 32–7), Russett (1976: 10–11), and Smith’s Norton History of the Human Sciences (1997: 324–5). Jennifer Mason explores this reshuffling of the phylogenetic deck in Civilized Creatures, noting the frequency with which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentators attributed advanced civilization to canis familiaris on the basis of their emotional and social intelligence, and absence of any encouraging data concerning their cognitive powers. As she observes, Darwin himself sought to reaffirm the centrality of dogs to human life in The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (Mason 2005: 81–2; Darwin 1872: 116–21). Harriet Ritvo considers pet keeping in British culture in The Animal Estate (1987: 3–21, 125–35). Many of her insights about how cultural practices such as pet keeping define national and social identity extend to American culture. For more general treatments of animal–human relationships and identity see Berger (1980: 9, 24–6), Kahn and Kellert (2002: 53–178), and Nabhan and Trimble (1994: 111–55). The ASPCC’s origins in the ASPCA may surprise modern readers, children’s interests self-evidently taking priority over those of animals in the minds of most. The organizations proliferated in the 1880s and 1890s,

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cooperating out of shared philosophical vision and financial need. However, as the Colorado Board of Child and Animal Protection affirmed in the early 1900s, “The protection of children and the protection of animals are combined because the principle involved, i.e., their helplessness, is the same; because all life is the same, differing only in degree of development and expression; and because each profits by association with the other” (McCrea 1910: 137; Shelman and Lazoritz 2005: 11–19). Some critics question how complete this estrangement was. In Civilized Creatures, Mason finds that pet ownership has been underestimated as a source of human knowledge about animals in late-nineteenth-century America. She argues that animals were central to the political and social discourses of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charles W. Chesnutt, among others. In a chapter concerning Stowe’s race politics, for example, Mason demonstrates continuities among humans and other animals in Stowe’s work that suggest a broad conception of interspecies moral obligation, which perhaps provide a model for her notions of interracial moral obligation. Similarly, “Difficult Sympathy in the Reconstruction-Era Animal Stories of Our Young Folks,” Brandy Parris contends that Reconstruction Era animal stories “emphasize kindness to animals and figure goodness in terms of one’s ability to sympathize with others” of all kinds (2003: 27). These arguments seem predicated on the idea that sentimental views of animals cannot coexist with estrangement. I don’t believe this is the case. Using animals symbolically requires only their imaginative presence. Their material presence might actually undermine the symbolic systems humans construct. While I value these critics’ historical research. I believe that the practice of interpreting animal languages tends to re-inscribe hierarchical relationships as much as it challenges them, since animals provided a blank slate on which urbanized Americans drew freely. For further information about anthropomorphism in the nineteenth century, see Paul White’s essay about the Victorian rhetoric of experimental science and animal welfare in Thinking with Animals (2005: 46–8, 66–8). In Pets in America, Katherine Grier points out that several child contributions to magazines like Our Young Folks and St. Nicholas in the late nineteenth century are stories written from their pet’s point of view (1995: 72–3). She also theorizes about the permeability of the child/animal border (pp. 166–76). Twain’s writings seem often to correct the error of using “human” as an honorific. To reduce his interest in anti-vivisectionism to a late life folly unrooted in experience or conviction, as critics such as Peter Messent have done, is to dismiss sentimentalism in a predictably and uncritically Modernist way. Jennifer Mason suggests as much in the conclusion of Civilized Creatures (2005: 173).

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A section of “Cyno-psychoses” categorizes and analyzes the names children give pets (Bucke 1903: 460–5). In The Nature Fakers, Ralph Lutts details how Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1890) galvanized public opinion against animal cruelty in the same manner Uncle Tom’s Cabin stirred up anti-slavery sentiment (1990: 22). “A Dog’s Tale” operates in this tradition of sentimental activist literature. Hall helped found the Parent-Teacher Association, an organization that engages lay citizens in teaching work nationwide by encouraging parents to monitor their children’s studies. For more about Hall’s outreach work in psychology and education, see Zenderland (152-165). Kenneth Kidd also interprets Hall’s work in terms of the intersection between specialist and nonspecialist cultures. Kidd focuses on psychological institutions and scouting organizations (34-36; 142). Gail F. Melson advocates pet keeping as a source of moral instruction, but does not acknowledge G. Stanley Hall’s 100-year-old work on the subject (2001: 7–21). Melson writes that “children’s ties to animals seem to have slipped below the radar screens of almost all scholars of child development” (p. 12). A key to interpreting her assessment of contemporary educational psychology is to determine whether or how Hall’s work qualifies as scholarly. Major works in sentiment studies challenge the Modernist exclusion of popular works such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Twain’s short fiction as irrelevant and aesthetically negligible works; see Kete (1999: 13–16), Merish (2000: 128–30), Sánchez-Eppler (2005: 26–9), and Tompkins (1985: 124–2). For work on Twain and Sentimentalism, see Camfield (1994: 16–19, 45–52). In addition to the critical studies of anthropomorphism cited above, popular works such as Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (2005) and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (1996), and the success of “The Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan” on the National Geographic Channel, among others, suggest that animal–human relationships continue to preoccupy the American public.

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Chapter Sixteen Child Consciousness in the American Novel: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), What Maisie Knew (1897), and the Birth of Child Psychology Holly Blackford

With the publication of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (1897) came the incarnation of child consciousness in the American novel. Both Twain and James represented the perceptions of children to articulate theories of how the mind is formed. They were responding to “the new psychology” of the late Victorian era, particularly the newly blossoming field of child study. Psychologists pioneering child study were following the lead of Charles Darwin in theorizing that study of the child and “primitive” would shed light on the evolution of human consciousness. Huck and Maisie formulate the basic theory that what makes an individual distinct is the consciousness that he/she develops in a particular environment. As John Dewey claimed in his 1884 article “The New Psychology,” Darwin made possible the concept of studying an organism in its environment (p. 278). In their “studies” of fictional children Huck and Maisie, Twain and James draw attention to the limits of human consciousness and the impossibility of objective epistemology, given environmental conditioning. Both novels explore the child’s powers of reasoning, a central concern of Victorian child psychologists, reasoning Twain traces to the folk reasoning of Jim. Victorian psychologists deemed the child and “primitive” mind equivalent because they held an evolutionary and anthropological perspective. They understood the child and the primitive as similarly engaged in interpreting the book of nature and as developing intellectual faculties from natural experience

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and play, rather than from formal curriculum. The following passage exemplifies parallel reasoning between Huck and Jim: It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened—Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn’t say nothing against it, because I’ve seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they’d got spoiled and was hove out of the nest. (p. 158) Victorian psychologists were busy studying how children “naturally” deploy myths and reason through making analogies. Like his cohorts, British psychologist James Sully studied the child’s anthropomorphic tendencies: “The child, in his early stage of worldliness, is egoistic and (therefore) anthropomorphic. He confers upon animals and even upon inert matter those psychological properties which he dimly perceives in himself. . . . a number of the child’s hypotheses are strikingly similar to those shared by older and more primitive cultures” (1977: xxviii–xxix): “Primitive man looks on wind, rain, thunder, as sent by some angry spirit” (p. 82). Child study pioneers, from Darwin to Freud, represented child and “primitive” as pre-evolved. Psychologists and educational theorists saw in such reasoning powers the child’s natural propensity to learn from experience and nature rather than books. Twain absorbed and parodied this idea by providing Huck with a counterpoint in Tom Sawyer, who reasons, quite ridiculously, from books. With Jim as Huck’s guide to interpreting “the signs” of nature, Twain engages with Victorian theories of child development just as James does with Maisie, who is also endeavoring to read and interpret the world around her. The characters around Maisie joke that Maisie is “not learning,” but like Huck, Maisie is theorizing from her environment. She, too, reasons by analogy. For example, when she hears that her mother has a relationship with a new man, she asks Miss Overmore whether this new man could not also become her tutor? This innocent question demonstrates the cleverness with which James uses the child’s reasoning. Maisie is explicitly drawing an analogy to prestigious schools with male instructors; but, implicitly, she is questioning Miss Overmore’s role. Like Huck, Maisie often reasons in a way that challenges and exposes the relatively hostile and immoral adults around her. Both authors place their child protagonists in environments in which only the fittest survive through adaptation and reason, abilities to which Victorian psychologists attributed the supreme adaptability of the human race. However, the reasoning powers of Huck and Maisie are limited because other characters penetrate their minds. The inorganic and therefore alien aspects of the child

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mind became increasingly apparent to child psychologists, who found the child mind methodologically difficult to access. Even as they believed to be studying “the beginnings of things” (Drummond 1901: 14) psychologists constructed the child as a foreign site that required observation and interpretation. Twain’s and James’s studies of child minds were more extensive accounts of the formation of consciousness than psychologists could do with real children. Their fiction became touchstones of modernist philosophy because they detailed the process by which external stimuli infiltrated consciousness and made it alien to human will. Evolution, Anthropology, and The Birth of Child Study In 1877, Darwin published “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” inspiring a new genre that psychologists would affectionately call baby biography. Darwin’s sketch of his infant was drawn from a diary that he wrote thirty-seven years earlier; it embodied his quest to understand the ascent of man, through daily observation of his child’s movements. Throughout the sketch, he endeavors to describe those movements accurately and interpret them as instinctual or voluntary. If instinctual, they would represent the inherited memory of the human species; fear of loud noises, for example, was a common infant instinct that investigators thought atavistic—something once contributory to the survival of the primitive human. Throughout Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and America, researchers would follow Darwin’s lead. They tackled questions such as when and how did sensation become perception? When did the individual become conscious of its own thoughts, and when did it begin to express its will? How, and by what mechanism, did the individual adapt to its environment? The figure of the child gradually assumed a new importance as the theory of evolution, natural selection, and adaptation influenced the new psychology. Responding to a publication by M. Taine on his child’s language acquisition, Darwin’s 1877 piece started a conversation organized around child study. Similar recordings of infant development were published by psychologists such as William Preyer, Bernard Perez, G. Stanley Hall, and others. In 1890, Perez translated into English Dieterich Tiedemann’s Record of Infant-Life, which he supposed to have been written by the German writer 100 years prior, but which had gone unnoticed until a French translation appeared in 1863. This conversation about the origins of human subjectivity would blossom over the next twenty years until the child study movement was established as the field of developmental psychology. The British Child Study Association was founded in 1894 (Monroe 1898/1899: 374). The journal Pedagogical Seminary, founded by prominent American psychologist Hall, would in 1898 begin to report annually on the progress of child study by summarizing major contributions. By 1901, Edward Lee Thorndike would feel the need to translate “notes on child study” in a book for educators.

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Thorndike had plenty of material to apply to education. William Preyer had published The Mind of the Child in 1882 (Part I “The Senses and the Will,” and Part II, “Development of the Intellect”). In 1885, Perez published The First Three Years of Childhood. In 1893, Frederick Tracy published The Psychology of Childhood. James Sully published, among many other works, Studies of Childhood in 1896. In France, investigators such as Alfred Binet would pioneer work in intelligence. In 1893, American psychologist James Baldwin published Mental Development in the Child and the Race, a title that demonstrates the correspondence between child development and what was known as race psychology. In 1884, Hall was appointed professor of psychology and pedagogy at Johns Hopkins, where he would produce many important works on childhood and adolescence. Hall had studied with William James at Harvard, and James recommended his appointment, claiming that of all the psychologists in the States, only he and Hall were qualified to teach the new psychology (White 1994: 110). Hall would invite Freud to lecture in 1909 (p. 120), and Freud’s studies of infant sexuality appeared in 1905. Nearly all the early psychologists articulated the idea that child study mattered because by observing children and “the lowest races of mankind” (Sully 1970: 4), “we are watching the beginnings of things. . . . Our modern science is before all things historical and genetic, going back to beginnings so as to understand the later and more complex phases of things as the outcome of these beginnings” (pp. 4–5). All of them credited Darwin’s influence on the field, claiming child observation as the study of “nature’s spectacle” (p. 5). The question, of course, became the nature of Nature. Followers of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Fröbel saw the child as a plant rather than a “savage,” but psychologists agreed that ancestral memory overturned Locke’s concept of the tabula rasa, which had influenced romantic theories of the child’s innocent, pre-fallen nature. Educational theorists such as F.H. Hayward grappled with the implications of child study and the vexed question of whether a Romantic or Darwinian view of nature should prevail: Why do I call Wordsworth’s view “nonsensical”? For the reason that ever since Darwin’s Origin of Species was published, thinking men have no longer been able to regard nature in herself as wholly wise or kind. There is a calmness, a callousness—one might almost say a cruelty and wastefulness—about her that precludes the reflective man from holding this view. There goes on everywhere in Nature a “struggle for existence,” and the “fittest” who survive are not necessarily the most loveable creatures, but rather those that are strongest, or at any rate those that are most adapted to their special circumstances. (Hayward 1904: 26) The question of whether child nature was inherently best or in need of regeneration would circulate in the educational application of child study. Twain exploits this critical crux by placing his child in between two father figures

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who exemplify learning from the natural world but who also represent two contrasting views of nature—Pap a savage view, and Jim a kind one. While the idea that child development embodied adaptation to the environment went unquestioned, psychologists debated how adaptation occurred. Psychologists such as Perez and Baldwin emphasized imitation, while those such as Preyer and Sully emphasized the child’s perceptions and ideas. Twain and James enter the debate by focusing on the interaction between imitation and perception. They sketched Victorian developmental concerns: the child’s adaptability and evolution to a state of knowledge; propensity to imitate and internalize others; tendency to base moral understandings upon the reactions of others rather than abstract moral principles; learning by experience and “reading the world” rather than books; and the reasoning and suggestibility of the child. In his writing, Sully emphasized the idea that the child did not lie so much as respond to suggestion, something Twain plays with in his characterization of Huck, who finds himself “suggested” into various roles. James expands on the concept with Maisie, who continually finds one situation to suggest another (the environment of the brown woman suggests Arabian Nights, the face of the Captain suggests Mrs. Wix, etc.). With a pseudo-Romantic lens, both authors saw in the child innocence and uncorrupted nature, but both also saw that experiential learning, adaptation, and internalization of others were “natural” mechanisms of children’s intelligence, which would severely limit any human being’s capacity to transcend the limits of environmental conditioning. Both end their child protagonists’ journeys with questions about their freedom to make choices; Sir Claude’s insistence that Maisie is free to choose between living with him or Mrs. Wix seems an odd declaration in What Maisie Knew, unless we compare it with Huck, in which the choice to help or not help Jim is a question of Huck’s freedom. Both authors study the child’s reaction to environment and empirical reasoning to question whether the human being can, psychologically, be free. Maisie is “made” by Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale just as Huck is ultimately “made” by Pap and Tom (but not Jim). Mrs. Wix and Jim perform structurally similar functions: both are used by the child to bargain with those who have “made” him/her. Huck and Maisie try to make morally free choices but cannot escape the fact that they have been made “in the image of” progenitors. The Nature of Huck Twain’s Huck is a humorous model of adaptability. Unlike earlier child protagonists, such as Alice who explicitly cannot adapt to Wonderland, Huck adapts his discourse, stories, and performance to every town. He epitomizes survival of the fittest in particularly brutal Darwinian settings. His lies are the result of his suggestibility. For example, Jim suggests that Huck become a girl to glean information from a woman; when this fails to trick the woman, he becomes the role that she ascribes to him—that of escaped apprentice. He becomes a

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master adapter, transforming himself into George Jackson in the Grangerford household, an English servant for Mary Jane, and Tom Sawyer for Aunt Sally. He is continually “born again” after passing through water, a symbol of his inconsistent nature. When with the widow, he grows “used to the widow’s ways” (AHF: 18); when with Pap, “it warn’t long after that till I was used to being where I was, and liked it” (p. 30). Huck is so adaptable that when he begins to live in the “fancy” Grangerford home, he completely forgets about Jim. In perhaps the most humorous instance in which Twain hyperbolizes the child’s adaptability, Huck learns of the deceased Emmeline (the Grangerford’s daughter) and steps into her role, sketching graveyard poetry. But Twain expresses concern that adaptation and morality are at odds with each other. While adaptation is the principle of childhood and survival, it is also the principle of thieves and shysters, such as the King and Duke. As we will see, this conflict between the child’s infinite educability and morality is a problem in Maisie; what Mrs. Wix sees as “horrors” are not horrors to Maisie, so easily conditioned is the child. They are like the river that defines Huck’s tendency to morally drift and Maisie’s to enjoy stream of thought. Huck introduces various characters to suggest how the child internalizes various role models in the development of reasoning. The novel begins by positioning Huck between Tom, a symbol for ridiculous literacy and civilization, and Pap, a symbol for degraded and utterly “savage” nature. It then gives Huck two father figures, Pap and Jim, who represent two distinct views of the natural world. It then replaces Pap with Jim and positions Huck between Tom and Jim in the last third of the novel, when, unfortunately, Huck imitates Tom. But Tom is inside Huck’s psyche when he rejects Pap and fakes his death: he “did wish Tom Sawyer was there, I knowed he would take an interest in this kind of business, and throw in the fancy touches. Nobody could spread himself like Tom Sawyer in such a thing as that” (p. 41). And Pap is inside Huck when he journeys into nature. Huck internalizes Pap’s voice and disregard for property law: Mornings, before daylight, I slipped into corn fields and borrowed a watermelon, or a mushmelon, or punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind. Pap always said it warn’t no harm to borrow things, if you was meaning to pay them back, sometime; but the widow said it warn’t anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it. Jim said he reckoned the widow was partly right and pap was partly right. (p. 80) The widow and Tom are both embodiments of civilization. Like the widow, Tom calls “borrowing” stealing at the end of the novel. This discourse of stealing and “borrowing” recurs throughout the novel, signifying an unresolved debate between nature and culture in Huck’s head. When he resolves to steal Jim out of slavery, he rhetorically embraces thievery and demonstrates the pervasion of

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his thoughts by others. The dilemma quoted above is presented to and resolved by Jim, who decides that they should make a list of things they can and cannot borrow, thereby lessening the offense. Jim is a mediator and an accomplice in theft from the beginning. He defines himself as property, claiming that he has $800 since he now owns himself. Huck continues to use the term “borrow” for stealing and for his connection to his Pap: “We aren’t going to borrow [a canoe] when there warn’t anybody around, the way pap would do, for that might set people after us” (p. 130). He maintains not that borrowing is wrong but that it would interfere with what is expedient. Pap and Tom thus penetrate Huck’s moral reasoning, which in turn affects Jim. It is not an accident that Huck is reborn as the bookish Tom Sawyer in the very last section when he allows Tom’s elaborate and insensitive plans to consume his quest to steal Jim. Regarding Tom as better than himself, Huck aspires to imitation. The novel pits Pap’s and Tom’s definition of theft against one another, showing that the two characters compete for ascendancy in Huck’s mind: “Along during that morning I borrowed a sheet and a white shirt off of the clothes line; and I found an old sack and put them in it, and we went down and got the fox-fire, and put that in, too. I called it borrowing, because that was what pap always called it; but Tom said it warn’t borrowing, it was stealing” (p. 303). Tom goes on to suggest that prisoners, which is their game, have a right to steal what they need; like Jim, he justifies the need for “borrowing,” in similar terms to Pap. In fact, in the very beginning of the novel Tom organizes a band of robbers; although he is only pretending, he is, in fact, practicing for the “theft” that will free a man. These terms of “stealing” and “borrowing” are more than Huck’s endeavors to imitate his models and work out his conscience. They are Twain’s playful terms for what a child “thieves” from the role models in his environment— how his identity and vision of himself come to be. We could substitute “select” and “adapt” and arrive at the same place, but Twain cleverly twists the terms to denote moral ambiguity. After all, Huck’s final resolution to steal is actually the moral thing to do. But Huck does not know this; he believes himself to be stealing. Child study publications such as John Johnson Jr.’s study of “Rudimentary Society Among Boys” in 1883 and 1884 argued that seizure of property was a natural stage in “the development of country.” In Johnson’s study, boys at a school seized ownership of walnut trees, bird nests, and squirrel nests, then devised a system of currency and eventually developed a monopoly of land ownership and inheritance. The evolutionary point of view justified the child’s greed, impulsiveness, and play as the natural way civilization emerges. The question of “stealing” or “freeing” Jim symbolizes Twain’s skepticism about moral freedom; rather than reach active will, Huck evolves to a state of being conscious of early conditioning, blaming his early upbringing for his choice of wickedness, just as Pap blames everyone else but himself for his own behaviors and both Huck and Jim blame a snakeskin for bad luck. Resolving to tear up his letter, Huck says “I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line,

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bringing brung up to it, and the other warn’t” (p. 271). Thus Twain parodies the predominant view of how children learn from “the living books of our fellow men” (Hayward 1904: 26). Huck bases his moral reactions on how other people react, rather than on abstract notions of right and wrong. It is the Widow’s face that makes him feel sorry in an early scene, and not his understanding of a wrong. He imagines the Widow’s approval when he helps thieves (AHF: 91) or disapproval when he considers how he is helping Jim. He measures himself against what he believes others might think of him, worrying that helping Jim would make others think him a “dirty abolitionist.” He asks himself what Tom would do in certain situations, and calls upon what he learned from Pap as well; for example, he decides to follow Pap’s lead and let the Duke and King imagine themselves as whomever they wish. Huck faces the limitations of the child’s moral reasoning; he reacts morally when others respond to him in certain ways, but not on his own perceptions. When he tricks Jim into thinking that he dreamed the storm, and Jim gives him a moral lesson, Huck is guilty because he made Jim feel that way. He cannot perceive the wrongness of an action or situation, only the wrongness of making someone feel a particular way. For example, although he readily plays along with the King and Duke, he changes his mind when Mary Jane is particularly kind to him; only then does he consider the consequence of the robbery and how it might change her face. We will see a similar “reading of the world as a text” in Maisie, as she judges a situation solely by the reactions of others. In Twain’s view, this was not an ideal situation for the human race. Brutal social environments contrast Huck’s romantic proclivities to experience the intensity of nature and to go into nature to think. We witness Huck endeavoring to interpret the book of nature (pp. 4–5) before we even meet Jim. Twain offers Huck the alternative society of Jim because Jim is an expert on reading natural signs, reasoning completely from interpreting nature rather than from books or role models. Jim is an alternative parent and model of a kinder natural world, a romantic nature-reader standing apart from the savage societies on land and the rather Darwinian portrait of nature in Pap. Twain exploits the pairing Victorian psychologists made between child and primitive, but he does so in order to suggest limits to the evolutionary model. If Huck is evolving, then he will necessarily surpass that stage of natural, animistic thought and reach the bookish world of Tom in the final pages of the novel. Twain wants us to understand the interchangeability between Jim and Pap. Huck’s first substantial encounter with Jim is when Huck consults him about his father’s future; they are equal in the transaction. Both are withholding knowledge from the other for profit (Jim says the hairball will not speak without money, and Huck withholds knowledge of the dollar). Jim’s prophecy contains the assertion that Pap and Huck seem to have dual natures, something decidedly true about nature herself in the Victorian study of the child as a natural, evolving phenomenon. The prophecy asserts that Jim has intimate

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knowledge of Pap, and the moment Huck loses Pap he seems to attach himself to Jim. In Jim, Huck has an educator who models everything educational reformers wished. However, Twain also wishes us to understand that the pairing of Jim and Pap is complicated by the fact that Huck is probably destined to evolve into Tom, deserting the book of nature altogether. For example, Huck sometimes treats Jim as Tom treats Huck. Two scenes are parallel: when Tom tries to teach Huck about the genie and the lamp, finding that “you just can’t learn” Huck, and when Huck tries to teach Jim about Kings and speaking French, similarly concluding that “you can’t learn” Jim. Huck is initially similar to Jim when he challenges Tom’s book-logic regarding genies and lamps. Tom asserts that if Huck were a genie, he would “have” to be subservient. Huck denies this logic, hypothesizing that if genies are so large, why would they be subservient? The way in which Huck challenges the logic of many of Tom’s stories mirrors the way that Jim critiques the story of Solomon, when he refuses to see “the point” that Huck believes he should derive from the story. In contrast, Jim feels free to interpret signs in nature and dreams. Huck, as he pretends literate superiority to Jim, is in danger of becoming Tom, which comes to pass. In an ironic sense, Huck has also embraced Pap, who “borrows” and disregards the law. In a final irony, savage nature and civilization have combined in Huck’s consciousness. This is quite prophetic in a psychological era moving gradually to Freud’s ideas of the savage unconscious and the no less brutal influences of civilization. How Maisie Knows In What Maisie Knew, James actually works on similar developmental concerns such as Maisie’s adaptability, her education through experience, her propensity to imitate and internalize others, her tendency to understand a situation only through the reactions of others, and her analogical reasoning and selective focus on salient features of a situation rather than on the whole. James repeatedly emphasizes the sensations and impressions that fill Maisie’s consciousness, comparing her to a vessel. James’s idea of the unconscious is pre-Freudian; he appropriates it from specialists such as Sully, who drew upon Preyer’s theories of how sensation impressed into our experience, perceptions became ideas, and both sense and intuition combined to become mental concepts. Like Sully and others, who asserted the concept of sense memories and argued that nothing was lost in the mind, James posits the jumble of sense memories that reside in Maisie’s head through images, to which she later attaches meaning: “She found in her mind a collection of images and echoes kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers, like games she wasn’t yet big enough to play. . . . A wonderful assortment of objects of this kind she was to discover later, all tumbled up too with the things, shuffled into the same receptacle, that her mother had said about her father” (WMK: 22–3). James peppers his novel with metaphors for the child mind. Maisie’s view of the adult

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social world is like looking at “the slide of a magic lantern” (p. 21), walking “a long, long corridor with rows of closed doors” (pp. 36–7), and “flattening her nose against a pane of glass” (p. 82). James gives aesthetic shape to William James’s assertion that the child hyperbolizes the flux of consciousness that we all experience. Our stream of consciousness separates us from what we merely experience. Following Twain, we can interpret why James chose to end his novel with Sir Claude’s assertions about Maisie’s freedom. If the human being is trapped in a consciousness formed by combining elements of the human environment, then no one is truly free to choose, the premise of a moral action, in Kantian terms. James pairs Maisie’s sense of choice with the dependent, penniless Mrs. Wix, much like Twain pairs Huck’s sense of choice with the fugitive slave. Like Huck, Maisie is often swept away in new environments and forgets about Mrs. Wix. However, unlike Jim, Mrs. Wix is not a particularly desirable teacher. Although like Jim Mrs. Wix has been a parent, a fact that absorbs Maisie’s interest since she does not really have one, Mrs. Wix is a parody of an increasingly vocal type—the child-saver. She deploys the rhetoric of the anti-child labor movements, which Viviana Zelizer argues transformed the child from a “useful” wage earner to a “useless” but “priceless” commodity. Mrs. Wix exhorts Sir Claude to “make [Maisie] your life, your duty. She’ll repay you a thousand-fold” (p. 83). This is ironic because the child has “means” and Mrs. Wix can only benefit by possessing her. Mrs. Wix becomes a bargaining chip in Maisie’s struggle against her stepparents, just as Jim is an unstated way for Huck to rebel against Pap and the Widow. These rebellions are essentially illusive. By bargaining with Sir Claude at the end of the novel, Maisie demonstrates that she has beat him at his own game, the dominant metaphor for adult interactions in the novel (see pp. 17, 45, 51, 67, 76, 78, 107, 112, 136, 205). By imitating Sir Claude and learning to play, Maisie proves her father correct when he asserts that Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale have “made” Maisie. The moral problem of the novel is not so much the behavior of the adults, but the susceptibility of the child to accept it. Like Huck, Maisie is a model of adaptability, and uncomfortably so. Many things become natural to Maisie, “the natural way for a child to have her parents was separate and successive, like her mutton and her pudding or her bath and her nap” (p. 26). Whatever is is natural to the child. Just as Huck periodically deserts Jim, Maisie deserts others due to the perpetual present tense of a child’s mind: “In that lively sense of the immediate which is the very air of a child’s mind the past, on each occasion, became for her as indistinct as the future” (p. 24). When Maisie lives with Mrs. Wix, the memory of Miss Overmore fades; when she chooses to stay with Mrs. Beale, she fails to consider Mrs. Wix. After she has lived with her father, the memory of her mother becomes “a memory of other years—the rattle of her trinkets and the scratch of her endearments, the odour of her clothes and the jumps of her conversation” (p. 59). Just as Twain places Huck betwixt and between competing environments to show the ease of adaptation, James shuffles

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Maisie between divorced and remarried parents to test the child’s plasticity. Like Twain and many educators, James interpreted adaptation as essentially amoral. For example, Maisie fails to understand the difference between her governess as Miss Overmore and Mrs. Beale; all things look the same to her because she adapts to the environment regardless of title. Parodying educational theory, James places Maisie in a kindergarten of perversity. “Living books” displace textbooks: “What the pupil already knew was indeed rather taken for granted than expressed, but it performed the useful function of transcending all textbooks and supplanting all studies” (p. 62). Maisie is sometimes called “the child” and sometimes called “the pupil,” demonstrating that the two roles had become synonymous. Like Twain, James is deeply concerned with how Maisie learns by imitation, especially linguistic. Without even being conscious of the words, Maisie delivers a message from her father to her mother, “‘He said I was to tell you, from him,’ she faithfully reported, ‘that you’re a nasty horrid pig!’” (p. 24). Adults can use and abuse the child because of this “natural” parroting skill. Child psychologists believed imitation began before the child became conscious, but that consciousness was a transition between passive and active, as the child soon becomes conscious of imitating others, as we see in Huck’s transition to wickedness. The issue of moral education provided psychologists’ evolutionary view with a challenge. In an extensive discussion of the child’s moral potential, Sully argued that consciousness distinguished even the youngest child from a savage animal state (p. 234); consciousness was the very foundation of a child’s moral being. Only a few pages after Maisie parrots her father, James portrays Maisie’s deliberations about whether or not to repeat her mother’s message to her father—to say “that he lies and he knows he lies” (p. 26). James uses the image of performance to describe the adult world, giving us his own vision of learning theory. The child watches the adult drama and selects which roles to play. For example, when Maisie plays dolls, she enacts the character of her mother (p. 37). However, Maisie most readily imitates the language of Sir Claude. When she uses his word “draw” to mean extract, the narrator observes, “It was astonishing how many [of Sir Claude’s words] she gathered in” (p. 64). Maisie and Sir Claude tend to mime each other, for example going back and forth with “you said so” “as if they were playing a game” (p. 67). Maisie demonstrates how closely she resembles Sir Claude in speech when she separately says the same thing he does to Mrs. Wix. Maisie’s imitation of Sir Claude seems to be the result of several factors. She admires his beauty and gentlemanliness; psychologists felt that beautiful or salient objects “seize” the attention of a child’s consciousness, relatively passively, and that even in play a child was “possessed” by an idea (Sully 1977: 37). Sir Claude becomes a vehicle for Maisie to make the transition between passive, pre-conscious imitation and consciousness. He treats her like a conscious being. He “was liable in talking with her to take the tone of her being also a man of the world” (p. 66), just like Jim treats Huck as an equal when he exacts Huck’s promise not to tell. Sir Claude draws an economy of equality

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between them when he bargains with Maisie: “If you’ll help me [see Mrs. Beale], you know, I’ll help you” (p. 66). Bargaining is a speech act that at once constructs the recipient as a free agent and points out the consequences if he/she does not “freely” comply. The novel ends with the bargain that Maisie attempts to strike with Sir Claude, signifying the fact that she has fully become him. Her language becomes fully adult; for example, she says things like “our affairs are involved” (p. 165), learning to cloak the truth with words just as she has learned to conceal her real feelings and pretend stupidity with her mother. She seeks to replace Mrs. Beale in Sir Claude’s affections. When Maisie decides to live with Mrs. Beale, she hears for the first time of her own beauty (p. 98), a prominent attribute of Mrs. Beale. After Maisie realizes that the one thing Sir Claude fears is himself, she realizes that she is the same. Her upbringing becomes completely apparent to her, just as Huck’s becomes to him. She “retreat[s] before the fact that Continental life was what she had been almost brought up on” (p. 209). James pits the moral absolutism of Mrs. Wix and the moral relativism of Sir Claude against the child’s moral sense, which is entirely a result of what impresses the child’s consciousness. What impresses Maisie, like what impresses Huck, is not the moral situation in itself but the way people react to it. The emotions of others are the semiotic textbook. For example, “Maisie was not at the moment so fully conscious of [her parents] as of the wonder of Moddle’s sudden disrespect and crimson face” (p. 23). Maisie reads the manner of others for her information: “Her [mother’s] manner at that instant gave the child a glimpse more vivid than any yet enjoyed of the attraction that papa, in remarkable language, always denied she could put forth” (p. 74). In attempting to interpret the presence of Mr. Perriam in her mother’s house, Maisie learns not to ask but to read the situation and gain knowledge that way. Maisie is sensitive to the body languages and performances of others: “It took her pupil but a moment to feel that [Mrs. Wix] quivered with insecurity” (p. 79). It is Sir Claude’s change in tone (p. 108) that impacts her when they meet her mother and a lover in the park. In other words, Maisie’s experience of herself is entirely mediated by others. She has few raw reactions, but she becomes an expert at interpreting other people’s feelings, even to the extent that she can quote how she thinks they perceive things; she hears the unspoken words of her father’s desires to be let off the hook rather than actually take her with him to America, and she hears those words in his own voice, as if she has direct access to a dialogic unconscious. As such, Maisie embodies a consciousness that is entirely mediated by internalized perceptions of others: “there was an extraordinary mute passage between her vision of this vision of his, his vision of her vision, and her vision of his vision of her vision” (p. 132). Layers of visions result in a complex process of suggestion. For example, in order to access how she feels about parting from Mrs. Wix, Maisie recalls going to the dentist and the peculiar fact that she “felt most anguish” when Mrs. Wix screamed for her (p. 33). By working out the

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mediation of emotion and response, James moves Victorian child psychology into the modern sense that the self is fractured and detached from experience. Conclusion: Alienation and the Object of Child Study The contrast between Mrs. Wix’s “emotional sympathy” and Sir Claude’s detached contemplation suggests James’s engagement with treatment of the child as an object of inquiry by male professionals. Desiring access to the child’s mind, male psychologists such as Sully and Perez claimed that the detached eye of science must be turned on the child, and that although Victorian mothers and nurses had unique access to the child, they lacked objectivity to really understand child nature. Drummond reiterates: Side by side with direct observation of the child must go interpretation. This is the province of the science of psychology. This is the most difficult branch of child study and the most fascinating. He who would undertake it must be gifted not only with the power of observing with scientific accuracy, but with what has been called his scientific imagination. . . . We are learning that the child does not see as we see, and therefore does not quite see what we see. (p. 16) Just as the gentlemen of her father’s company poke and pinch the child, child study was transforming the child into an object alien from adult memories of childhood. Their methods of study were altering from introspection to observation, mirroring James’s choice of limited third person rather than the introspective method of Huck. Most of the adults in the novel detach from Maisie but value her as an object. James humorously suggests that the commodification of the child could actually result in de-evolution when a relative says of her “poor little monkey.” In fact, Maisie compares herself to meat when the gentlemen pinch her and, in her mind, associate her body with the fat on a steak. The corrupting influence of the adult social world is similar to Twain’s pseudo-romanticism; Maisie’s “unspotted soul” (p. 19) can hardly last. Like Twain’s novel, Maisie engages with the question of how the child is educated by featuring the most animated conflict between Maisie’s two governesses, Miss Overmore a.k.a. Mrs. Beale and Mrs. Wix. They embody distinct ways of coping with evolution and competition for a mate. Miss Overmore “works her way up” by exploiting her beauty and youth, and marrying well. Mrs. Wix, in contrast, voices a moral high ground. Thus Maisie experiences the age-old conflict between beauty and righteousness. Both governesses desire Sir Claude, who with his gentlemanliness suggests a cold view of female evolution. Maisie’s governesses function in the same way that Pap and Tom represent what Huck could become, under certain tutelage. Thus both Twain and James deploy child consciousness, as newly conceived by Victorian psychologists, to critique the idea that a person can ever be free.

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Not only is a child surrounded by possible destinies, but he/she also selects what impresses his/her consciousness and internalizes it. The individual can hardly transcend early conditioning. As a child’s consciousness evolves, the child only becomes more and more removed from its experience, growing toward a state of utter alienation: It was to Mrs. Wix, during this appeal, that Maisie’s contemplation transferred itself. . . . There was in fact at this moment a fascination for her pupil. . . . So the sharpened sense of spectatorship was the child’s main support, the long habit, from the first, of seeing herself in discussion and finding in the fury of it—she had had a glimpse of the game of football— a sort of compensation for the doom of a peculiar passivity. It gave her often an odd air of being present at her history in as separate a manner as if she could only get at experience by flattening her nose against a pane of glass. (p. 82) Due to the evolution of the mind and new methods of objectifying it, the child is present at but detached from her own history.1 The sense that our own pasts are inaccessible furthered the growing sense among psychologists that the child was synonymous with an individual’s unconscious (see Steedman 1995), which uncannily resides underneath layers of civilization. Jenny Bourne Taylor views Sully as a crucial transition figure between Victorian child psychology and Freud’s new interpretation of Darwin. In an 1893 article, Sully links childhood, evolution, and dreams; his article would be cited by Freud in Interpretation of Dreams (Taylor 1997: 93). Twain and James are on the cusp of a Freudian world, working out the earliest ideas about child development, which were still largely philosophic rather than scientific. Notes 1

In a forthcoming article in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, I argue that the way in which Child Study challenged traditional method shifted the attention of writers to new methods of objectifying consciousness, just as writers theorizing the child mind, such as Lewis Carroll and R.L. Stevenson, influenced psychologists. The methodological experimentation that characterizes the modern period can be linked to the methodological experimentation called for by developmental psychologists and blossoming in the more psychological studies of children such as L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.

Contributors

Holly Blackford is Assistant Professor of Children’s and American literature at Rutgers University, Camden. She has published a book on the reader-responses of girls, Out of This World: Why Literature Matters to Girls, and numerous articles on children’s literature . Rita Bode is Associate Professor of English Literature, Trent University, Canada. Other Spofford essays appear in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance and CLUES. In young adult literature, she has published on L.M. Montgomery. Lorinda B. Cohoon is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Memphis, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in children’s literature. She has published articles on boyhood and citizenship in children’s periodicals in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, and her book Serialized Citizenships: Periodicals, Books, and American Boys, 1840–1911 was published by Scarecrow Press in 2006. Melanie Dawson teaches at The College of William and Mary. She is co-editor of The American 1890s: A Cultural Reader and author of Laboring to Play: Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class Cultural Life, 1850–1920. She has also written about configurations of a “miniaturized” girlhood in relation to children’s play and is currently working on a study of the Realists’ investments in sympathy. Monika Elbert, Professor of English at Montclair State University, has published widely on nineteenth-century American women writers and on Hawthorne. Her co-edited Reinventing the Peabody Sisters was recently published (University of Iowa Press, 2006). Melissa Fowler is a Graduate Student at Rutgers University where she is pursuing her doctorate in the Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education. Her specific research interest is in the ways teacher preparation programs can better

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prepare teachers to confront issues of race, gender, and social class in the classroom. She received her Masters in English from The College of New Jersey. Lesley Ginsberg is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Her work has appeared in American Literature, Studies in American Fiction, and in edited collections, including The American Child. She is currently completing a manuscript entitled The ABCs of American Romanticism: Children’s Literature and Antebellum Culture. Janet Gray is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at The College of New Jersey. She is the author of Race and Time: American Women’s Poetics from Antislavery to Racial Modernity (2004) and editor of She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (1997). The chapter in this volume originated as a collaborative final project in a graduate seminar Gray taught on the construction of childhood in nineteenth-century American children’s literature. The co-authors—one a librarian, the rest teachers in middle and high schools and a community college—were students in the seminar. Roxanne Harde is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alberta, Augustana. She is currently working on a monograph on Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s reform writing, and she has an edited collection of essays, Narratives of Community: Women’s Short Story Sequences, forthcoming, 2008. Eric S. Hintz is a doctoral student and William Penn Fellow studying the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned his B.S. in aerospace engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 1996 and received his M.A. in the history of science from Penn in 2005. He is working on a dissertation that considers the changing fortunes of American independent inventors in the early twentieth century. Jeannette Barnes Lessels is a poet whose honors include a Pushcart Prize. She has over twenty-five years’ experience in collecting, reading, studying, and sharing American children’s literature in every type of library. Formerly a library department head for Auburn University at Montgomery, Alabama, she is now Patient Medical Librarian for the Veteran’s Administration in Alexandria, Louisiana. Anne Lundin is Professor, School of Library and Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of Constructing the Canon of Children’s Literature: Beyond Library Walls and Ivory Towers (Routledge, 2004). Joan Menefee teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Stout. In her research, she examines the intersections of childhood, psychology, and literature in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Martha L. Sledge is an Associate Professor of English at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City. She works on nineteenth-century women’s autobiographies and diaries.

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J.D. Stahl is Professor of English at Virginia Tech. He is co-editor, with Elizabeth Lennox Keyser and Tina L. Hanlon, of Crosscurrents of Children’s Literature: An Anthology of Texts and Criticism (Oxford University Press, 2007), and the author of Mark Twain, Culture and Gender (University of Georgia Press, 1994). He teaches in the summer M.A. Program in Children’s Literature at Hollins University and has served as president of the Children’s Literature Association. Eric Sterling teaches at Auburn University Montgomery, where he is Distinguished Research Professor of English. He has published numerous essays and three books: The Movement Towards Subversion: The English History Play from Skelton to Shakespeare, Life in the Ghettos During the Holocaust, and Dialogue: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Shawn Thomson is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas-Pan American and the author of The Romantic Architecture of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Maria Holmgren Troy is Associate Professor in English at Karlstad University, Sweden. Recent publications include In the First Person and in the House: The House Chronotope in Four Works by American Women Writers (1999); Memory, Haunting, Discourse (co-edited, 2005); Collective Traumas: Memories of War and Conflict in 20th-Century Europe (co-edited, 2007).

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Index

Abbott, C.C. 220 Abbott, Jacob xv, xx, xxii–iv, 83–96 Abbott, John 83 Abbott, Lyman 84 abolition xx, xxiii, 5–6, 16, 51–53, 69–82, 84–7, 97–113, 145–6, 186, 252 Adams, John 82 Adams, Nehemiah 102 Adams, William Taylor (Oliver Optic) xxi, xxiv Adkins, Kaye 222 adoption 26, 31, 63–5, 121–5 Agassiz Association 213–26 Agassiz, Elizabeth 221 Agassiz, Louis 221–5 Alcott, Bronson xviii, 19, 46, 51, 100, 179, 185–6 Alcott, Louisa May xx, xxi, xxiii, 19–38, 41, 45–7, 61, 98, 105–7,162, 226, 263–4; Little Women 24–30, 32, 37, 46, 66, 162 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey 152–3, 161, 228 Alger, Horatio xx, xxi, 49, 60–2, 135 Allen, Ann Taylor 193 Amper, Susan 128. Andersen, Hans Christian 116, 158–62, 264, 277. Andrews, Sidney 102 animals/pets in children’s literature 97–103, 159–60, 227–43, 246 Ard, Patricia 162 autobiography 46, 95, 103, 116, 152, 165–78, 179–87, 200–6, 221–2, 227–32, 240; memoirs 165–78 Avallone, Charlene 17 Avery, Gillian 158

Bakhtin, M.M. 156 Baldwin, James 248–9 Ballard, Harlan H. 214–25 Baylor, Ruth M. 187 Baym, Nina 16 Bayma, Joao 40, 44–5, 53 Beatty, Barbara 184, 193 Beauties of the New England Primer 77 Bederman, Gail 178, 228 Beecher, Catharine 99 Bell, Michael Davitt 177 Bendixen, Alfred 115 Berger, John 241 Berlant, Lauren 6, 8, 17 Berliner, David 240 Bernardi, Debra 37 Blackwood, James 204, 206, 207 Blake, William 89–91, 191 Bode, Rita 128 Bourne Taylor, Jenny 258 Boyd, Anne 160 Boynton, H.W. 190 Brace, Charles Loring 22–3, 30, 56–64, 265, 273 Brandon, Curris 140–1 Bremner, Robert H. 22 Brightwell, C.L. 197, 200–6 Broderick, Dorothy 51 Brodhead, Richard 15, 37 Brontë, Charlotte 118 Brooks, Albridge Streeter 197, 199, 201, 203–4, 207–8 Brosterman, Norman 193 Brown, Gillian 98 Browne, C.E. 233–6 Browne, J. Ross 136 Bryant, Sara Cone 192

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Bryant, William Cullen 39–47, 53 Bucke, Fowler 233–6, 243 Burnett, Frances Hodgson 188, 191 Camfield, Gregg 243 Canning, George 139 Carnes, Mark 211 Carson, Gerald 230 Chadbourne, Alice 41–5, 47 charity xxi, 13–14, 19–38, 42–7, 55–67 Chatton, Barbara 198, 205 Chesnutt, Charles W. 242 Child, Lydia Maria 3, 4, 15, 16, 41, 62, 98, 100, 101, 106, 109, 113, 126, 266, 270 child-rearing 10, 15, 58–9, 151, 184–85, 193; see also education Christian values xxiii, 20, 63–6, 92, 109, 119–21, 137–46, 205–9, 213–15, 224, 230 Chollet, Louise E. 104, 105 Christmas stories 19–38, 48–51, 57,188 citizenship (models of) xvii–xxiii, 3–16, 55–63, 75–6, 94–5, 135–41, 145–7, 161, 185, 190, 207–9, 236–7 Civil War xxiii, 23, 26, 84–5, 97–105, 136–42, 207–11; Reconstruction xxi, 41, 53, 98, 100–9, 135, 194, 242 Clark, Beverly Lyon 152–3, 161 Clark, Suzanne 166, 178 Clement, Priscilla 86 Clements, Victoria 16, 17 Cohoon, Lorinda B. 16, 135, 161 “A Confederate Alphabet” 81 Confederate Spelling Book 82 consumerism 35–7, 44–51, 135–6, 180–1; capitalist notions of success xviiii, xxii, 24–36, 40–1 Cooley, Thomas 178 Coolidge, Susan 126 Cooper, Carolyn C. 198 Cornelius, Janet 79 Cott, Nancy 167 Coughlan, Margaret N. 198 Cowan, Ruth Schwartz 210, 231 Cowper, William 147 Cozzens, Frederic S. 113 Craft, Hannah 80 Crain, Patricia 71–2, 77, 82 Cremin, Lawrence 180 Croly, David G. 102, 113 Cronquist, Arthur 218

Dahlstrand, Frederick C. 100 Dalke, Anne 128 Damon-Bach, Lucinda 16, 17 Darling, Richard L. 150, 161, 162 Darwin, Charles xxii, 22, 27, 34, 36, 208, 211, 213, 223–5, 228–34, 241, 245–9, 252–8, 266, 267, 270, 273, 275 Davis, Paul 27, 38 Dawson, Carl 178 De Rosa, Deborah C. xx, 5, 16, 38, 69, 71–2, 76, 80, 82, 107 death in children’s literature xx, 6–14, 32–5, 56–66, 101–4, 118, 146, 158–60, 238–9 Defoe, Daniel 44, 133–47 Degler, Carl 183 Deleuze, Gilles 3–4, 16 Derks, Scott 89 Dewey, John 193, 245, 267, 275 Dickens, Charles 27–8, 30–1, 121, 190, 228; A Christmas Carol 27, 37–8, 126 Dodge, Mary Mapes xxii, 24, 39–53, 150–1, 161, 214–15, 222, 267, 268, 269, 271, 272 Dolan, Marc 178 Douglass, Frederick 79–80 Doyle, Christine 37 Draper, John 211 Drummond, W.B. 247, 257 DuBois, W.E.B. 41 Dusinberre, Juliet 193 Edison, Thomas 197–210 education of children xix, xxiv, 3–5, 12–17, 23, 40–5, 70–81, 120–1, 155, 162, 168, 170, 175, 180–94, 199–210, 215–25, 228–43, 248–55; kindergarten 179–194, 215; see also Alcott (Bronson); Froebel, Peabody (Elizabeth); Pestalozzi. Eiselein, Gregory 23, 26, 27, 137 Elbert, Monika 186, 210 Elbert, Sarah 36 Eliot, George 124, 140 Ellis, R.J. 128 Ellison, Julie 140 Emerson, Ralph W. xviii, 179, 213 Fahs, Alice xxi Fazio, Joyce 42–3, 53 Fetterley, Judith 7 Fields, James T. 98–102, 113

Index The First Reader, for Southern Schools 104 Fisher, Dexter 168 Fleming, Mary Agnes 141 Follen, Eliza 51, 88, 98, 103–7, 113 food in children’s literature 13–14, 26–32, 38, 43–4, 51–60, 76–7, 107, 143–4, 176, 202–9 Foote, Stephanie 37 Foster, Richard 161 Fowler, Melissa 41, 49 Franklin, Benjamin 141, 200–10 Freedmen’s Book 100–5 Freeman, Mary Wilkins 37, 129 Freud, Sigmund 246–8, 253, 258 Froebel, Friderich 179, 181, 183–93, 215, 225, 248 Fuller, Margaret 36 Gannon, Susan 40–2, 46 Garrison, William Lloyd 72–4, 81, 106 Gaul, Theresa Strouth 128 Geist, Christopher 71 Gender differences, and girls and boys’ reading 11–15, 40–53, 150, 155–58, 161; definitions of boyhood/manhood 45–51, 135–47, 152–5, 174–5, 199–201; gender equality 116, 219–21, 229–33; gender and race 74–6, 116–19, 211, 242, 248–52; gender and social class 58–60, 126–8, 154–6, 160–2; girlhood/womanhood 3–17, 42–5, 116–28, 149–51, 169–74; women’s sphere 5–16, 21, 44–7, 101, 129, 149, 154–5, 185–8 Gilbert, John 200 Ginsberg, Lesley 113 Ginzberg, Lori D. 23 Giovani, Regula 160 Goble, Mark 177 Gold, Eva 128 Goodman, Susan 178 Goodrich, Samuel 25, 164 Gordon, Lynn 180 Gould, Hannah Flagg 15, 106 Gray, Asa 224 Gray, Barry 146 Gray, Janet xxi, 6, 16, 24, 40–2, 51, 76 Greene, David J. 14 Grier, Katherine 100, 113, 232, 237, 242 Griffen, Clyde 211 Griffin, Jenna 50, 53

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Griswold, Jerry 66, 198 Hafen, Jane 165 Haines, Michael 178 Halbeisen, Elizabeth 115 Hale, Edward 139 Hale, Edward Everett 200, 202–3, 206, 208 Hale, Lucretia Peabody 41, 49–50, 157, 159 Hale, Sarah Joseph 15 Hall, G. Stanley 174, 178, 240–3, 248 Hamilton, Gail (Mary Abigail Dodge) xxiv Harper’s Young People (children’s periodical) 28–35, 115, 172 Haskell, Thomas 81 Hawthorne, Julian xvii–xix, 156 Hawthorne, Nathaniel xviii, 161, 242 Hayward, F. H. 248, 252 Hazen, Jacob A. 137–8 Headrick, Daniel 211 Hearth and Home xv, 38, 98–9, 109–13 Hedrick, Joan 98, 113 Heininger, Mary Lynn 151–2 Hendler, Glenn 135, 211, 269, 275 Hersholt, Jean 162 Hewins, Caroline Maria 220, 226 Hofstadter, Richard 22 Horton, Rushmore G. 102 Howard, June 166 Howells, William Dean 172–8 Huck, Charlotte S. 198 Hughes, Thomas 198–9, 208 humor 41, 149–60, 176–8, 257 Illustrated Alphabet 81 immigrants, depiction of 11–13, 28–36, 40–5, 55–7, 60, 101, 118, 123–5, 180, 193, 236 imperialism 5–7, 119–21, 133–47, 207–9 invalidism in children’s literature 32, 116, 126–8, 187, 188 Jacobs, Harriet 79 Jagusch, Sybille 226 James, Henry 165, 171, 175–8, 245–9, 253–8 James, Michael 209, 211 James, William 248 Johnson, John, Jr. 251

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Index

Jung, Carl 211 Jurich, Marilyn 202 Juvenile Miscellany (children’s periodical) 3–17, 106, 128 Kahn, Peter 241 Karcher, Carolyn 4–5, 15–16, 113, 128 Keeney, Elizabeth 223–4 Keller, Holly 73, 78 Kellert, Stephen 241 Kelley, Mary 16 Kelly, R. Gordon 15, 40, 58, 198–9 Kerber, Linda 5, 17 Kete, Mary Louise 243 Kidd, Kenneth 126, 135, 178, 211, 243, 263 Kilcup, Karen 16 Kime, Wayne R. 44 Kirkham, E. Bruce 99 Klimasmith, Betsy 178 Kuhn, Doris Young 198 Kuntze, M.A. 226 Kymlicka, Will 16 Lang, Amy Schrager 58 Larcom, Lucy 166–73, 178 Lareau, Annette 58 Layton, Edwin 198 Lazerson, Marvin 193 Lazoritz, Stephen 242 Lears, Jackson 180–1 Lemire, Elise 113 Levander, Caroline xix, 10, 38, 76 Leverenz, David 135, 146, 211 Levine, Lawrence 198 Lewis, Paul 37 Lincoln, Abraham 83, 107–9, 211 Lindberg, David C. 211 Linderman, Gerald F. 142 Lindsay, Debra 219 Locke, John 151, 227–30, 248 Logan, Lisa 116, 128 Lundin, Anne 149, 161 Lurie, Alison 116, 162 Lurie, Edward 213, 216, 225 Lutts, Ralph 243 Lynch-Brown, Carol 93 Lystad, Mary 71, 153, 162 McCrea, Roswell C. 232, 242 McCulloch, Fiona 193 McCulloch, Lou W. 72

MacLeod, Anne Scott 40, 66, 88, 116, 153, 162, 181 Mahoney, Lynn 149, 150, 160, 161 Maier, Charles S. 211 Mann, Horace 100 Mann, Mary Peabody 162, 187, 226, 264, 272 Marsella, Joy A. 46 Marshall, Ian 128 Marshall, Megan 186 Marshall White, Franklin 232 Marten, James xxi Martingale, Hawser 138 Mason, Jennifer 110, 237, 241, 242 Mason, Jim 230 Matlack, James 161 Matthews, Brander 136 Mayhew, Henry 200, 202 Mellor, Anne 183 Melson, Gail F. 243 Melville, Herman 119, 138–9, 261 Merchant, Carolyn 181 Merish, Lori 100, 243 Merrihew and Thompson (printer) 71, 82 Merry’s Museum 25, 28, 32, 34, 35, 38, 61, 263, 264, 268 Meyer, Susan 118, 120, 272 middle class vs. working class xix–xxiii, 5–13, 21–38, 40–53, 56–66, 69–80, 84–8, 97–108, 116–28, 135–47, 152–60, 183–5, 193, 215, 220, 230–40; see also charity; poverty Minstrel Songs, Old and New 51 Mintz, Steven 180 Mitchell, Donald Grant: abridged version of Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 41–7 modernism xxiv, 178, 181, 193, 240–3, 247, 258 Monroe, Will 247 Montgomery, L.M.(Anne of Green Gables) 190, 258 Moore, Anne Carroll 191–2, 226 Morgan, William M. 23 Morrison, Toni 41 Morss, John 241 Murray, Gail 40, 41, 84–5 Myers, Mitzi 183 Myerson, Joel 263, 264, 268 Nabhan, Gary 241 Nardone, Alina 41, 51–3

Index Nasmyth, James 200–2 Nast, Thomas 98, 110 Native Americans 3–12, 16, 102, 165–9 Nelson, Claudia 65,126 Nelson, Dana 6, 140 Nelson, Thomas, and Sons 205 New England Primer 71, 77, 264, 266, 273 Nikolajeva, Maria 85, 156 Nissenbaum, Stephen 30–1, 36 Northrup, Solomon 95–6 Nott, Josiah Clark 102 Opfermann, Susanne 128, 160 Orphanhood xviii, xxiii, 20–31, 36, 37–8, 55–66, 200–1, 210 Our Young Folks 24, 32, 60–1, 97–8, 101–12, 115, 135, 149, 171, 216, 242 Parker, Francis Wayland 220, 225 Parris, Brandy 98, 242 Peabody, Elizabeth 100, 186–7, 264, 267, 272, 273, 276 Perez, Bernard 247–9, 257 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 40–4, 51, 184, 225, 269, 273, 277 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart xv, xx, xxiii, 55–66, 98, 107, 108, 129 Phillips, Anne K. 27 Phillips, Richard 135, 141 play, children at xxii, 5, 9, 39–41, 53, 57–9, 106, 127, 136–9, 142–4, 147, 150, 154, 169–71, 173, 184–92, 215–16, 234, 245–6, 251, 254–5 Poe, Edgar Allan 51–2, 133 Porter, E.A. 143–4 Porter, Dorothy 80 poverty 19–38, 43–8, 55–66, 120–5, 188, 202–5, 221, 227, 236–7; see also Brace, Charles Loring; charity Putnam, Robert D. 193 Putnam’s Magazine 157, 162 Putzi, Jennifer 116 Quinlivan, Mary E. 85, 86 race xix–xxiii, 4–11, 16–17, 40–1, 50–3, 56–8, 69–82, 83–96, 97–113, 116–20, 140, 146, 174, 178, 190, 211, 242, 248, 252–3 Rasmussen, R. Kent 241 Ratner, Sidney 213

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realism xvii–xix, xxiii–iv, 21–3, 38, 141–2, 150–2, 160–1, 165–78, 190–4 reform movements xix, xxi, 23–7, 40, 56–60, 72–8, 99–110, 161, 180–93, 209, 228–9, 253; Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals 98–109, 232, 241; temperance 65–6, 193, 198, 203–9; women’s suffrage 179–86 Restad, Penne 27, 30, 32 Ritvo, Harriet 241 Robbins, Sarah 5, 13 Romanticism (and constructs of childhood) xviii, xxi, xxiii, 39–53, 76, 151–60, 168, 180–194, 205, 223–5, 248–58 Rose, Jacqueline 151, 155–6, 161 Rotundo, E. Anthony 142, 154 Rubina 141 Rudolph, Emanuel D. 219 Russett, Cynthia Eagle 228, 241 Ryan, Susan M. 275 Said, Edward 145 St. Armand, Barton Levi 128 St. Nicholas (children’s periodical) xv, xxiii, xxiv, 24–5, 34, 39–53, 55–6, 61, 63–5, 115, 150, 214–25, 242, 263, 264, 265, 267, 268, 270, 272, 273, 274, 275 Samuels, Shirley 70, 75 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen xxix, 16, 55, 58, 71, 78, 82, 113, 119, 125, 150, 161, 178, 243 Sansevere, Danielle 46, 53 Saxton, Martha 46 Sayers, Frances Clarke 192 Schueller, Malini Johar 117 Scott, Joan 179 Scudder, Horace 151, 158–60, 162 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria xxi, xxiii, 3–17 sentimental writing xx, xxi, xxiii, 4–9, 21–38, 45–9, 98–112, 126–8, 137–47, 149–60, 165–78, 181–9, 191, 230–43 servants in children’s literature 24–32, 57–9, 104, 155–6, 239 Shaker, Bonnie James xx, 38 Shapin, Steven 205 Shapiro, Michael Steven 185 Shelman, Erica 242 Shinn, Thelma J. 116 Shufeldt, R.W. 220

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Index

Sigourney, Lydia Huntley xxiii, 3–17 Singley, Carol xix, 267, 268, 271 slavery xx–xxii, xxiii, 5–10, 16–17, 51–2, 69–82, 90–6, 97–113, 116–19, 128, 141–6, 211, 243, 250–4; Anti-Slavery Society 69–81; Freedmen’s Bureau 105; Fugitive Slave Act 74, 95; see also abolition Smith, Adam 34, 140 Smith, Elizabeth Oakes 61 Smith, Henry Nash 181 Smith, John 140 Smith, Nora 181, 185, 188, 191 Smith, Robert McClure 160 Smith, Roger 237, 241 Smith, Susan Belasco 99–100 Smith, Theodate 236 Smith, Tony 89 Soderland, Jean R. 80 Spofford, Harriet xx, xxiii, 115–28 Stansell, Christine 59, 62, 66 Steedman, Carolyn 258 Stevenson, Robert Louis 181, 191, 258 Stoddard, Elizabeth xx, xxiii, 149–63 Stoneley, Peter 21, 24 Stowe, Harriet Beecher xxiii, 80, 97–113, 118, 128, 232, 239, 242; Uncle Tom’s Cabin 80, 97–9, 102–4, 106, 113, 128, 239, 243 Sully, James 246–9, 253, 255–8 Sumner, William Graham 22, 27 Taine, M. 247 Taylor, Ann 98, 113 Taylor, Jane 98 Taylor, Jenny Bourne 258 Thome, James A. 72 Thompson, Ruth Ann 40, 46, 267 Thomson, Rosemarie Garland 127 Thoreau, Henry David 215 Thorndike, Edward Lee 247–8 Tice, Karen 22 Ticknor and Fields (publishers) 98–102, 113 Tiedemann, Dietrich 237 Together, A Novel (Anonymous) 144–5 Toll, Robert C. 85 Tolley, Kim 219, 225 Tomlinson, Carl M. 93 Tompkins, Jane 143, 183, 243 Townsend, Hannah and Mary 69, 72

Tracy, Frederick 248 Trattner, Walter I. 23 travel 49, 94, 102, 136–46, 173–7, 179–88, 208 Trimble, Stephen 241 Trowbridge, John Townsend xxi Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens) xxiv, 66, 83, 136–7, 152–4, 160, 162, 227–43, 245–58; Huckleberry Finn 136–7, 240, 245–57; Tom Sawyer 136–7, 152–3, 160, 162, 229–39, 246–51 Updike, John 189 urban life 13, 20, 30, 38, 40, 59–65, 146–7, 153–4, 160, 167, 170, 175–8, 180, 187–8, 193, 208–9, 242 Vallone, Lynne xxi Vandewalker, Nina 183 Wachhorst, Wyn 197, 209, 210 Waits, William B. 27 Walegir, Rachel 43–4, 53 Weber, Max 206 Weems, Mason 140, 198 Weinauer, Ellen 160 Weinstein, Cindy 166 Westergaard, Waldemar 162 Wexler, Laura 165 White, Andrew Dickson 211 White, Paul S. 242 White, Sheldon 248 Wiebe, Robert H. 208 Wiggin, Kate Douglas xxiii, 179–94 Willis, Nathaniel Parker 3–4, 14 Winch, Julie 80 women’s suffrage 179–86, 194 Wordsworth, William 151, 162, 163, 181, 182, 185, 190, 191, 224, 248 Xie, Shaobo 128 Youth’s Companion (periodical) xx, xxi, 3–17, 34, 35, 36, 37, 59, 61–3, 66, 115, 264, 266, 269, 274, 275, 276 Zelizer, Viviana 183, 254 Zenderland, Leila 243 Zipes, Jack xiii, xix Zitkala–S
a (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) 165–72