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Introduction: Robinson Crusoe, the Child, and the People

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Introduction: Robinson Crusoe, the Child, and the People Notes Introduction: Robinson Crusoe, the Child, and the People 1 See Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel, especially pp. 30–4, for his definition of ‘formal realism.’ The status of formal realism as the central component of a definition of the novel has been vigorously contested over the last few decades, perhaps most notably by Nancy Armstrong in Desire and Domestic Fiction. 2 On the subject of Crusoe’s individualism, see Watt, ch. 3, ‘“Robinson Crusoe,” Individualism and the Novel.’ A number of critics have discussed Robinson Crusoe in the context of colonial expansion, among them, Firdous Azim in The Colonial Rise of the Novel, in which she coins the term ‘sovereign subject,’ and Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism. For more sustained postcolonial readings of Robinson Crusoe, see Peter Hulme’s Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1497–1797, especially ch. 5 ‘Robinson Crusoe and Friday’ and Brett C. McInelly’s ‘Expanding Empires, Expanding Selves: Colonialism, the Novel, and Robinson Crusoe’ (Studies in the Novel 35.1 [2003]: 1–21). Robert Markley has challenged the Crusoe-as-triumphant colonizer reading recently, arguing instead that the sequels to Robinson Crusoe exhibit a strong anxiety and uncertainty over Britain’s status as world power given Chinese trade and military prominence in the period; see ‘“I have Now Done With My Island, and All Manner of Discourse About It:” Crusoe’s Farther Adventures and the Unwritten History of the Novel.’ 3 See, for example, Stephen Hymer’s ‘Robinson Crusoe and the Secret of Primitive Accumulation’ (Monthly Review 23 [1971]: 11–36). 4 Virginia Woolf remarked of Robinson Crusoe that it ‘resembles one of the anonymous productions of the race itself rather than the effect of a single mind’ (89); Ian Watt, in Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe, describes Crusoe as a ‘reflection of the virtues and vices of the English character’ and his story as ‘the epic of the stiff upper lip’ (171). 5 See J. Donald Crowley’s ‘Introduction’ to the Oxford World’s Classics edi- tion of Robinson Crusoe, vii. 6 For a comprehensive discussion of the early evolution of the robinsonade, see Artur Blaim’s ‘The English Robinsonade of the Eighteenth Century.’ 7 Chartier describes ‘appropriation’ as a kind of popular usage of elite cul- tural materials, in which common readers, for example, take elements from elite literature, adapting and altering these elements to fit their own interests and needs. See Chartier’s ‘Culture as Appropriation: Popular cul- tural Uses in Early Modern France.’ 159 160 Notes 8 See my own The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003). Some of the early, important studies setting the groundwork for my own and other similar studies include Isaac Kramnick’s ‘Children’s Literature and Bourgeois Ideology: Observations on Culture and Industrial Capitalism in the Later Eighteenth Century’ (Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 12 [1983]: 11–44); Alan Richardson’s Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Samuel F. Pickering Jr.’s Moral Instruction and Fiction for Children, 1749–1820 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993); Mary V. Jackson’s Engines of Instruction, Mischief, and Magic: Children’s Literature in England from its Beginnings to 1839 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); and Patricia Demers’ Heaven upon Earth: The Form of Moral Children’s Literature to 1850 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993). Philippe Ariès’ Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (Trans. Robert Baltick. New York: Vintage Books, 1962), with its asser- tion that childhood as we know it did not exist before the Early Modern period, remains the touchstone for constructivist histories of childhood and children’s literature. 9 For Burke’s full account of this discovery, see ch. 1, ‘The Discovery of the People’ in his Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. 10 Warnings about children picking up vicious habits or irrational super- stitions (about ghosts and witches, most commonly) from the lower classes, especially servants, abound in the period’s children’s literature, pedagogical theory, and medical advice books. See my The Making of the Modern Child, 42–3, for an example of the psychological dangers writers for children believed the ghost stories of servants posed to children of the more privileged classes. 11 See Rosemary Sweet’s rich study of antiquarians, Antiquaries, for a full pic- ture of the development of this field of enquiry in Britain. While Sweet demonstrates that studies of popular customs like Brand’s made up only a small and fairly late-arriving part of the field (local histories, accounts of the ancient Britons, and studies of ancient architectural ruins made up a much greater part of antiquarian scholarship), Brand’s work was enor- mously influential in his time. According to David Vincent, ‘The study of popular culture in Britain begins with the publication in 1777 of John Brand’s Observations on Popular Antiquities [which] attracted widespread attention and led to the founding of the Society of Antiquaries in 1784 with Brand as its resident secretary’ (‘Decline’ 22). 12 Charles does get the opportunity to demonstrate his acquired superior wisdom on a few occasions. For instance, when his uncle describes how the squabbling ‘petty sovereigns’ of ancient Britain were easily defeated by the Romans, Charles can apply a lesson learned from ‘a fable, which I read the other day. An old man observing his children to be always quarrelling, desired them to bring him a bundle of sticks, which while they were tied up closely together, could not be broken; but when the bands were cut, they were taken out one by one, and easily destroyed’ Notes 161 (17). Charles recognizes the childishness of the ancient Britons and is, unlike those mired in the ignorant past, able to move past it, in part at least because of the advantages of literacy. 13 See Susan Pederson, ‘Hannah More Meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, and Popular Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century England’ ( Journal of British Studies 25.1 [1986], 84–113) for an insightful study of More’s efforts at popular reform through the distribution of religious tracts. 14 Brand singles out such cruelties as bear-baiting and the shrove Tuesday tradition of ‘throwing at cock’ for particular condemnation as examples of popular practices dangerously out of step with modernity and that ‘we wish consigned to eternal oblivion . fit only for the bloodiest savages, and not for humanized men’ (I: 76). 15 David Vincent observes that John Brand – who sought to reform a dangerous popular culture – and the more Romantic-inclined Walter Scott – who sought to preserve a cherished tradition threatened by the onslaught of modernity – were more similar than different in their ‘approach to the material’ they studied. Both were informed by the same assumptions about their subject: ‘that the popular culture under investi- gation was fundamentally apart from and antecedent to that which the collectors belonged; and that its central element, the oral tradition, was in decline’ (23). 16 De Certeau points out the peculiar paradox of antiquarian studies of the people, which assert the childlike status of the people yet in which chil- dren themselves are generally conspicuously absent (‘Heterologies’ 131). 17 Robert Muchembled paints an even starker picture of a Church and State assault on the people in eighteenth-century France that infantilized and disarmed a once robust popular culture: ‘And the popular masses, in many ways, were terrorized and reduced to a childlike state, which made them all the more submissive. This childlike state was induced by the diffusion of a new mass culture, alienating and extremely different from their traditional view of the world’ (234). 18 De Certeau observes that the search for ‘a lost origin’ that character- izes the study of popular culture is predicated on ‘the elimination of popular menace’ in the present (128), which accounts for the silence in these studies on such dimensions of popular experience as sexuality and violence (131). These are, not coincidentally, two of the ‘funda- mental characteristics of popular culture’ that were ‘expunged’ during its transformation into children’s literature and culture (133). The asso- ciation between a safe, sanitized model of rustic life and childhood is still deployed in political discourse today. As Henry Jenkins remarks of Hillary Clinton’s use of the village metaphor in the title of her book, It Takes a Village, ‘its evocation of the organic communities of small- town American life, depends upon the historic linkage of childhood innocence to pastoralism’ (12). 19 In his seminal study of European childhood, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Ariès claims that much of what we take for 162 Notes granted as ‘natural’ to the experience of childhood did not exist until the early modern period. His argument has been critiqued from a number of quarters; for example Nicholas Orme has identified characteristics of a distinct childhood in the medieval period, and Anthony Fletcher has argued that the history of childhood in England is characterized more by continuity than by change. See Orme’s Medieval Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) and Fletcher’s Growing up in England: The Experience of Childhood 1600–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 20 Alan Richardson traces the parallel ‘rise of the children’s and “popular” literature industries’ in the late eighteenth century to ‘a discursive and social matrix . which tended to equate child and laborer with “rustic” and “savage”’ (1994: xiv). The pedagogical impetus of the period was informed by this matrix of associations. 21 The celebration of ‘spontaneity’ as a lost, longed for quality innate to both the people and children is rightly, if cynically, exposed by de Certeau as disingenuous: ‘The child’s spontaneity is one thing adults are supposed to lack, but this divergence is a ruse that only increases adults’ confidence in their knowledge’ (132).
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