Chapter 1: Children's Books, Childhood and Modernism
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Notes CHAPTER 1: CHILDREN'S BOOKS, CHILDHOOD AND MODERNISM 1 Characteristics of French Art (London, 1932). The original lectures are graphically described in Virginia Woolf's diary for Saturday, 13 February 1932: 'I break off from my plain duty which is to read the Anatomy of the World, to record Roger's lecture: last night. Roger rather cadaverous in white waistcoat. A vast sheet. Pictures passing. He takes his stick. Gets into trouble with the lanternists. Is completely at his ease. Elucidates unravels with fascinating ease & subtlety this quality & that: investigates (with his stick) opposing diagonals: emphasises the immediate & instantaneous in French art. Here a Queen about to fling out her fingers: here a mother "turning to look at something & losing herself in pensive & tender reverie, while her child struggles to look the other way, & she restrains it, unconsciously, with perfect ease & control" , - The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (Harmondsworth, 1982) Iv.76. 2 When The Wind in the Willows was reviewed in the TLS on 22 October 1908 (p. 362), the reviewer suggested that the new book, which contained 'the materials for an English "Uncle Remus" ... without the animating spirit', was perhaps intended 'to send readers [for the hundredth time1 to its deathless forerunners - to "The Golden Age" and "Dream Days".' Virginia Woolf's unsigned review of E. M. Forster's A Room with a View appeared in the TLS just below this one on the same page, creating a juxtaposition which, if curious to a modern reader for whom the reputation of The Wind in the Willows has totally eclipsed that of Grahame's earlier books, shows the esteem in which The Golden Age and Dream Days were held earlier in the century. 3 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published by Macmillan in 1865 but withdrawn because Carroll and Tenniel were dissatisfied with the printing - Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice (Harmondsworth, 1960) p. 347. The book was reissued in 1866. It was followed by Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (Macmillan, 1871). In this study I have adopted the practice of Roger Fry and of many Victorian as well as modern writers of referring to the first book as Alice in Wonderland. All quotations are from Gardner, The Annotated Alice. Page references, prefixed AW for Alice in Wonderland and L-G for Through the Looking Glass, are given in parentheses following quotations. 4 Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (London, 1898) p. 107, notes: 'So recently as July, 1898, the Pall Mall 279 280 Notes to pages 2-5 Gazette conducted an inquiry into the popularity of children's books. "The verdict is so natural that it will surprise no normal person. The winner is 'Alice in Wonderland' .... With the exception of Shakespeare's plays, very few, if any, books are so frequently quoted in the daily Press as the two 'Alices'. " , 5 Virginia Woolf, 'Lewis Carroll', The Moment and Other Essays (London, 1947) pp. 70-1. 6 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 11.135. 7 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London, 1975--80) IV .12~9; Frances Spalding, Roger Fry (London, 1980) pp. 145, 246-7, 261. Professor Quentin Bell wrote to the author: 'I am pretty sure that the Stephen children had both the Alice books. I have no hard evidence.' He thought that the nickname 'the White Knight' was used 'long before that celebrated party' (letter to the author, 10 Aug. 1985). 8 Woolf, 'Lewis Carroll', The Moment, p. 70. 9 Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (London, 1975) pp. 360, 359, 120. 10 Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood (Harmondsworth, 1967) p. 314. 11 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Iv.322: 'No doubt Proust could say what I mean - that great writer whom I cannot read when I'm correcting, so persuasive is he. He makes it seem easy to write well; which only means that one is slipping along on borrowed skates' (18 Nov. 1924). Five months later she wrote: 'He will I suppose both influence me & make me out of temper with every sentence of my own' (8 Apr. 1925). 12 Roger Fry, Reflections on British Painting (London, 1934) p. 107. The late Mrs Pamela Diamand, daughter of Roger Fry, said in a recorded conversation with the author, now in the King's College archive, that a very old copy of Alice in Wonderland was among the Fry children's books. 13 Roger Fry, 'The Seicento', Transformations (London, 1926) p. 126, wrote: 'In this matter of the arts we suffer from every form of verbal misfortune. To begin with, the application of art and artist almost exclusively to the art of painting, when artist should be a word of general application to anyone who constructs with a view to esthetic satisfaction .... Goodness knows the writers are badly off enough, but at least they have some rough classification of those who use words; they can talk of a poet, an essayist, a novelist, a critic, a precis-writer, and so forth.' In this book the word'art' refers equally to the arts of writing and of painting. 14 Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction (London, 1984) pp. 142-3. 15 To explain this phenomenon is to venture beyond the field of purely literary enquiry. Rose urges that children's books should not be considered as a self-contained genre developing exclusively in relation to other children's books or other literary works. The same plea has been made for the study of modernism by Lothar Honnighausen in ' "Point of . View" and its Background in Intellectual History', Comparative Criticism, 2 (Cambridge, 1980) 152: 'The problem occupying many of us at the present time is to define categories and areas which enable a process of mediation between the social and literary spheres to take place.' Notes to pages 5-10 281 16 Max Beerbohm, 'The Child Barrie', Saturday Review, 7 Jan. 1905, pp. 13-14. 17 Peter Green, Kenneth Grahame, 1859-1932 (London, 1959) p. 161. 18 Max Beerbohm, 'Pantomime for Children' , Saturday Review, 14 Jan. 1905, p.45. 19 Alice Woods, review ofJames Sully, Studies of Childhood (London, 1895), in Mind,S, n.s., no. 18 (Apr. 1896) 256. 20 Ed Block, 'Evolutionary Psychology and Aesthetics: The Cornhill Magazine 1875-1880', Journal of the History of Ideas, XLV, no. 30uly-Sep. 1984) 465-75, analyses connections between the writings of Sully and Stevenson. In The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1.356, 501, Woolf notes that Sully liked her critical writing, and declared that she would write to tell him of her engagement. She did not always feel so genial, however, complaining in her diary on 3 April 1905 of a Professor Lee who bore a somewhat watered-down resemblance to both Sully and another of her father's friends identified by the initials 'CO B.' - possibly Charles Booth and who bored her to extinction (Diary, Xmas 1904-27 May 1905, p. 94, Berg Collection). She was at the time on board ship to Spain. 21 James Sully, 'The Child in Recent English Literature', Fortnightly Review, 67, n.s., no. 61 (Feb. 1897) 218-28. 22 Ellen Key, The Century of the Child (New York and London, 1909) p.185. 23 Coveney, The Image of Childhood, p. 280. 24 Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel, tr. Emilie Michaelis and H. Kealey Moore (London, 1886) pp. 54-5. 25 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, tr. from the French (London, 1970). 26 Baroness Marenholtz-Biilow, Child and Child-Nature, tr. Alice M. Christie (London, 1879) p. 43. 27 Friedrich Froebel, Mutter- Und Kose-Lieder, tr. F. and E. Lord, quoted in E. R. Murray, Froebe/ as a Pioneer in Modern Psychology (London, 1914) p.207. 28 Murray, Froebe/ as a Pioneer in Modern Psychology, pp. 209,205. 29 F. J. Harvey Darton, Children's Books in England, ed. Brian Alderson (Cambridge, 1982 [1st edn 1932]) p. 314. 30 Baroness Marenholtz-Biilow, Woman's Educational Mission: Being an Explanation of Frederick Froebel's System of Infant Gardens, tr. Elizabeth, Countess Krockow von Wickerode (London, 1855). 31 Sigmund Freud, 'Totem and Taboo' (1913 [1912-13]), The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. James Strachey (Hogarth Press, 1965) XIII. 127. All quotations from Freud's works are from this edition, hereafter referred to as SE. 32 Friedrich Froebel, The Education of Human Nature, in Froebel's Chief Writings on Education, tr. by S. S. Fletcher and J. Welton (London, 1912) pp. 32,23. 33 Murray, Froebel as a Pioneer in Modern Psychology, pp. 68-9, 73-5. 34 F. H. Hayward, The Educational Ideas of Pestalozzi and Froebel (London, 1904) p. 61, notes that FroebeI's distinctive contribution to Pestalozzi lay in his pioneering of education of the very young child through play. 282 Notes to pages 10-12 35 Friedrich Froebel, Pedagogics of the Kindergarten, tr. Josephine Jarvis, quoted in Murray, Froebel as a Pioneer in Modern Psychology, pp. 203-4, 171,243. 36 Marenholtz-Bulow, Women's Educational Mission, pp. 26,32. 37 Murray, Froebel as a Pioneer in Modern Psychology, pp. 102, 199, 202, draws attention to Cooke's prominence as a supporter of Froebel's ideas. His position as Vanessa Bell's first art-master is noted in Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell (London, 1983) p. 17, where the author refers both to his connection with Froebel and to that with Ruskin in the 1850s through the Working Men's College.