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Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature

Series Editors Kerry Mallan Faculty of Education Children and Youth Research Centre Kelvin Grove Queensland, Australia

Clare Bradford School of Communication and Creative Art Deakin University Burwood Victoria, Australia This timely new series brings innovative perspectives to research on children’s literature. It offers accessible but sophisticated accounts of contemporary critical approaches and applies them to the study of a diverse range of children’s texts – literature, ﬁlm and multimedia. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature includes monographs from both internationally recognised and emerging scholars. It demonstrates how new voices, new combinations of theories, and new shifts in the scholarship of literary and cultural studies illuminate the study of children’s texts.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14930 Emer O’Sullivan • Andrea Immel Editors Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature

From the Enlightenment to the Present Day Editors Emer O’Sullivan Andrea Immel Leuphana University Lüneburg Princeton University Library Lüneburg, Germany Princeton, New Jersey, USA

Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature ISBN 978-1-137-46168-1 ISBN 978-1-137-46169-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947692

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations.

Cover image © “Les touristes français.” Mon village, ceux qui n’oublient pas. Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom To Lloyd E. Cotsen, who understood the importance of documenting how children learn from books about sameness and difference ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We would like to thank the following people for their assistance in clearing rights and permissions for the illustrations reproduced in this monograph: Gerhard Gruitrooy and Liz Kurtulik Mercuri at Art Resource; Ebony Lane at Macmillan Children’s Books; Marilyn Scott at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Ohio State University; Thomas Keenan at Princeton University Library; Ian Dooley, AnnaLee Pauls, and Squirrel Walsh at the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; Tabeah Faubel at Verlag Herder; and Ute Zoerbach at Random House.

vii CONTENTS

1 Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature: An Introduction 1 Emer O’Sullivan and Andrea Immel

Part I Ethnography on Display

2 Learning to See: Eighteenth-Century Children’s Prints and the Discourse of Othering 29 Silke Meyer

3 Picturing the World for Children: Early Nineteenth- Century Images of Foreign Nations 51 Emer O’Sullivan

4 Figuring the World: Representing Children’s Encounters with Other Peoples and Cultures at the Great Exhibition of 1851 71 Gillian Lathey

5 Imagining the World in Bavarian Children’s Books: Place and Other as Engineered by Lothar Meggendorfer 89 Amanda M. Brian

ix x CONTENTS

Part II Internationalism and Tolerance

6 Imagining Equality: The Emergence of the Ideas of Tolerance, Universalism, and Human Rights in Danish Magazines for Children, 1750–1800 111 Nina Christensen

7 An Anthropologist Shows Girls a World of Difference: Louis-François Jauffret’s Géographie dramatique 129 Cynthia J. Koepp

8 Information or Exoticization? Constructing Religious Difference in Children’s Information Books 149 Gabriele von Glasenapp

Part III Constructing Self and Nation

9 Anxious Encounters: Picturing the Street Child in On the Sidewalks of New York 169 Lara Saguisag

10 Russian Picturebooks from 1922 to 1934: Modernization, Sense of Nationhood, Internationalism 187 Verena Rutschmann

11 Appropriating the “Wild North”: The Image of Canada and Its Exploitation in German Children’s Literature 215 Martina Seifert

12 Travel as Construction of Self and Nation 235 Margaret R. Higonnet

Index 253 LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1.1 Illustration from Peter Sís, Madlenka (New York: Frances Foster Books, 2000). © Peter Sís. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. 5 Fig. 2.1 “O the Roast Beef of Old England,” printed by Bowles & Carver ca. 1780–1790. Reproduced in Bowles & Carver, Catchpenny Prints: 163 Popular Engravings from the Eighteenth Century (New York: Dover, 1970), no. 123, p. 81. 37 Fig. 2.2 “Soup Meagre, Frogs and Sallad,” printed by Bowles & Carver ca. 1780–1790. Reproduced in Bowles & Carver, Catchpenny Prints: 163 Popular Engravings from the Eighteenth Century (New York: Dover, 1970), no. 123, p. 81. 38 Fig. 2.3 “Sailors, English, Dutch, French,” printed by Bowles & Carver ca. 1780–1790. Reproduced in Bowles & Carver, Catchpenny Prints: 163 Popular Engravings from the Eighteenth Century (New York: Dover, 1970), no. 31, p. 19. 41 Fig. 3.1 Illustration from J. Steerwell, The Little Traveller, or, A Sketch of the Various Nations of the World (London: printed and sold by Dean and Munday, Threadneedle-Street, ca. 1830). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library 52 Fig. 3.2 “Climates of the Earth” from the Rudiment Box (1834?). Reproduced with the permission of the Church of Ireland College of Education archives 57

xi xii LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 3.3 “Costumes of Nations, for Infant Schools” from the Rudiment Box (1834?). Reproduced with the permission of the Church of Ireland College of Education archives 60 Fig. 4.1 “The Exhibitors and Visitors” from The Crystal Palace That Fox Built: A Pyramid of Rhyme, with nine illustrations by John Gilbert (London: David Bogue, 1851). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library 73 Fig. 4.2 Illustration from Dolls and Sights of the Crystal Palace, Aunt Mavor’s picturebooks for little readers, no. 12 (London: Routledge, 1852), 6. Courtesy of V&A Images 78 Fig. 4.3 Illustration from Dolls and Sights of the Crystal Palace, Aunt Mavor’s picturebooks for little readers, no. 12 (London: Routledge, 1852), 7. Courtesy of V&A Images 83 Fig. 5.1 Illustrations from Lothar Meggendorfer, Nimm mich mit! Ein lehrreiches Bilderbuch, 3rd ed. (Munich: Braun & Schneider, ca. 1887). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library 96 Fig. 5.2 Illustrations from Lothar Meggendorfer, Nimm mich mit! Ein lehrreiches Bilderbuch, 3rd ed. (Munich: Braun & Schneider, ca. 1887). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library 97 Fig. 5.3 “Der Raucher,” from Lothar Meggendorfer, Aufgepaßt! Ein lustiges Bilderbuch mit beweglichen Bildern (Eßlingen: J. F. Schreiber, ca. 1900). Reproduced by kind permission of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin 101 Fig. 5.4 “Der Mohr,” from Lothar Meggendorfer, Aufgepaßt! Ein lustiges Bilderbuch mit beweglichen Bildern (Eßlingen: J. F. Schreiber, ca. 1900). Reproduced by kind permission of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin 102 Fig. 6.1 Georg Haas, The Children’s Games of Frederik VI (1771). From C. Gether (ed.), Kronprins og menneskebarn/ Kronprinz und Menschenkind (Sorø: Vestsjællands Kunstmuseum, 1988), 107. Reproduced courtesy of the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark 113 Fig. 6.2 Cover of Avis for Børn (Copenhagen: Avise-Contoiret, 1780). Reproduced courtesy of The Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark 118 Fig. 8.1 Map of “Religions of the World” from Manfred Mai, Rund um die Weltreligionen: 66 Fragen und Antworten, illustrated by Rolf Bunse (Freiburg i.B.: Herder, 2008), 8–9. Reprinted by permission of Verlag Herder. 153 LIST OF FIGURES xiii

Fig. 8.2 Illustration by Klaas Verplanke from Marita de Sterck, Glauben hat viele Namen: Die Religionen und ihre Feste, trans. Siegfried Mrotzek (München: Bertelsmann, 1997), 5. Reproduced with the artist’s permission 159 Fig. 9.1 L.M.G., “Fifth Lesson,” New York Journal, October 3, 1897. Reproduced courtesy of The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. 176 Fig. 9.2 L.M.G., “Third Lesson,” New York Journal, September 19, 1897. Reproduced courtesy of The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. 178 Fig. 9.3 L.M.G., “Seventh Lesson,” New York Journal, October 17, 1897. Reproduced courtesy of The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. 182 Fig. 10.1 Illustration by Vladimir Konashevich from V. Mirovich, Nasha ulitsa (Our Street) (Leningrad, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izd., 1926). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library 190 Fig. 10.2 Illustration by David Shterenberg from Anatolii Mariengof, Bobka ﬁzkul’turnik (Bobka the Sportsman) (Moscow: GIZ, 1930b). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library 192 Fig. 10.3 Illustration by Nisson Shifrin from Vladimir Maiakovskii, Kem byt’? (What Will I Be When I Grow Up?) (Moscow: GIZ, 1930). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library 194 Fig. 10.4 Illustration by David Shterenberg from Ė. Ėmden, Pesnia o Mame (The Song of Mother) (Moscow: GIZ, 1930a). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library 195 Fig. 10.5 Illustration by Georgii Echeistov from Yurii Gralitsa, Detskii international (The Children’s International) (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1926). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library 204 Fig. 10.6 Illustration by Mikhail Tsekhanovski from Samuil Marshak, Pochta (The Postal Service) 5th ed. (Leningrad: Raduga, 1930). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library 209 Fig. 11.1 Illustration by Hans Wolff von Ponickau from Friedrich Kipp, In Schnee und Eis. (Lengerich: Bischof und Klein, 1938) 227 xiv LIST OF FIGURES

Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature: An Introduction

Emer O’Sullivan and Andrea Immel

MAPPING PARAMETERS “In the universe, on a planet, on a continent, in a country, in a city, on a block, in a house, in a window, in the rain, a little girl named ...Madlenka ...finds out her tooth wiggles” (Sís 2000). Madlenka, Peter Sís’s multilayered, transnational picturebook about how a young girl playfully negotiates the world within her block could be considered perfectly in tune with the early twenty-first-century ideal to grow in children as young as possible genuine tolerance and appreciation for the world’s diverse cultures. When sameness and difference figure prominently in contemporary children’sbooks,representations may be considered appropriate only when there is a three- way convergence between the author’svalues,thework’sspecific purpose, and the priorities of adult readers acting as society’s gatekeepers.

E. O’Sullivan (*) Leuphana University Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany A. Immel Cotsen Children’s Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, USA

© The Author(s) 2017 1 E. O’Sullivan, A. Immel (eds.), Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8_1 2 E. O’SULLIVAN AND A. IMMEL

Today, lecturers in literature, education, or library science can include the picturebooks Mon village (My Village, 1914)orL’Alsace heureuse (My Alsace, 1920) by Oncle Hansi (pseudonym of Jean-Jacques Waltz) in introductory surveys of children’s literature only as examples of propaganda (a Hansi illustration is reproduced on this book’s front cover). Hansi’s iconic illustrations of life in an Alsatian village (today even marketed as evocations of a vanished French rural paradise) were intended to feed anti-German sentiment in Alsace-Lorraine while sover- eignty over the territory was contested by Germany and France. The artist and writer Tomi Ungerer, who read the books when a boy during World War II, called Hansi “[a] bigot who insidiously and systematically taught us to hate our neighbors” (Ungerer 1998, 28). But even authors who try to offer positive depictions of subjected people—the representations of slaves in Mrs. Ives Hurry’s “Goodness Not Confined to Complexion or Form” (1795) and in Ramin Ganeshram and Vanessa Brantley-Newton’s controversial A Birthday Cake for George Washington (2016) are good examples—can be condemned on various grounds, depending upon the values of the reader.1 Can humorous portrayals of foreign people ever be innocent and funny, or does prejudice always undermine them to some degree? The controversy over Judy Schachner’s popular Skippyjon Jones character, a Spanglish-speaking Siamese cat who pretends to be a Chihuahua bandito in a Zorro mask (Schachner 2003), suggests that any author going there had better be prepared to walk into a mine field. While the identification and evaluation of these conventions concerns practitioners—parents, teachers, school librarians, editors, and publishers vetting materials—the process is equally important to literary critics and historians who examine children’s books for evidence of a society’s attitudes and the ways those ideas circulate in order to contextualize them. A nuanced understanding of the what and how and why of portraying sameness and difference is critical to an appreciation of the role of children’s books in promoting social change, a tenet that remains as important today as in the Enlightenment, when William Godwin, the radical political philosopher, children’s book author, and publisher, made it central to his vision of humanistic education. This volume engages with this what and how and why of portraying sameness and difference. Sís’s picturebook serves as a figurative twenty-first-century bookend to the chapters here, which probe a corpus of texts from Denmark, Germany, France, Russia, Britain, and the United States to investigate cultural SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 3 sameness and difference for children in a variety of forms and genres over the last 200 years. We can follow a virtual trajectory from English popular prints of the 1780s—the other bookend—presented in Silke Meyer’schapter,to firmly culture-specific perspectives found in nineteenth- and early twentieth- century children’s books, discussed in the chapters by Gillian Lathey, Margaret R. Higonnet, and Martina Seifert, or attempts to eradicate the old sense of national identity by substituting a new one in the early Soviet picturebooks analyzed by Verena Rutschmann, to Sís’s dynamic, transnational account. This short description reads deceptively like a narrative of progress toward tolerance. However, as the chapters on children’sdramas and magazines of the Enlightenment by Cynthia J. Koepp and Nina Christensen show, twenty-first-century texts do not have an exclusive claim to tolerance or to differentiation. Likewise, there are representations of difference in today’s children’s literature that belie the idea of a simple, positive evolution toward tolerance. Thanks to increased opportunities for self-publication and distribution via Amazon, many more voices across the cultural and political spectrum are being raised, which the traditional gatekeepers of children’s books would have muted. A comprehensive survey or a history of representations of difference in children’s literature has not been attempted to date, and this volume does not aim to provide it. Instead, the chapters offer a sample of the issues and materials that are part of this history and the kinds of question that can and must be asked of them if such a survey or history should someday be written. By engaging with the past and by considering heavily illustrated, non-fiction, instructional, and religious materials in addition to literary works, the authors provide a wider context and a more discerning way to look at diversity and national identity tropes in children’s literature today. Madlenka serves in this introduction as a kind of template that allows us to address issues common to the texts discussed in the chapters and to approach some overriding questions and central issues: identity and belonging; sameness and difference; how other nations andethnicgroupsarerepresentedinliterature;theoriginandtradition of these representations; and the functions that images may have both within the work and outside of it in terms of potential effect. And Madlenka, as a picturebook, serves as a reminder of how form and genre may shape the ways in which sameness and difference are presented in books for children. All these elements will be considered in more detail in what follows. Madlenka further showcases aspects of performance and spatiality central to the chapters by Cynthia J. Koepp 4 E. O’SULLIVAN AND A. IMMEL and Lara Saguisag, and invites us to observe the centrality of the categories of the tour and the exhibition, which are explored in the chapters by Margaret R. Higonnet, Silke Meyer, Emer O’Sullivan, Gillian Lathey, and Gabriele von Glasenapp.

SHIFTING BETWEEN MACRO- AND MICROCOSMS The eponymous protagonist in Sís’s Madlenka is, on first sighting, a tiny red dot drawn on a distant planet, viewed with a panoptic gaze from outer space. On the facing page, the camera zooms in closer to the planet, revealing the red dot to be on the edge of a continent. Turn the page, and the zoom reveals that the dot is actually located within a grid of city blocks. Turn the page again, and the camera eye has reached the final destination of this cosmic voyage: a block of a city that is recognizably New York. The playfully schematic drawing of the block, with small stores occupying the ground-floor premises, seems to be a picture of an idealized East Village (see Fig. 1.1).2 So far, so universal: the main character, Madlenka, has been introduced spatially in terms of her place in the macrocosm, but none of these markers is of any real significance once she occupies the center stage. The primary geographical unit she inhabits is neither the continent nor the country, nor even the city, but just that one block, an exclusively local environment that contains both home and faraway places.3 Before the story ends, Madlenka will have circumnavi- gated it to tell her friends and neighbors from Latin America, India, Asia, Germany, Italy, and France the exciting news about her loose tooth, a small rite of passage anywhere children live. After she finally gets home and her concerned parents ask, “Madlenka! Where have you been?” she aptly responds, “Well ...I went around the world.” That simple but profound statement underscores the reality that there is indeed a lot of world on Madlenka’s block; it is, in fact, a microcosm of the universe charted on the endpapers (Sís 2000). Madlenka tours her block as an exterior, physical space and as an interior, mental one thanks to Sís’s ingenious design concept. The local stores she visits sell everyday items such as bread, vegetables, and newspapers, but their proprietors come from countries around the world. She enters those countries through the various storefront windows: the die-cut pages literally offer glimpses at the wordless, opulently colored fantasy visions of her neighbors’ different cultures on the next page. Once the page with the window is turned, the reader can see Madlenka in her SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 5

Fig. 1.1 Illustration from Peter Sís, Madlenka (New York: Frances Foster Books, 2000). © Peter Sís. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. bright-pink outfit, yellow rubber boots, and umbrella looking in on the left-hand side at the fantastic dreamscapes. This book, published in the first year of the twenty-first century, presents a transnational, urban childhood. The transnationalism is imparted on two levels. First, we have a specific cultural area (a city in the United States) 6 E. O’SULLIVAN AND A. IMMEL represented in the style of another: Sís, an internationally acclaimed artist, illustrator, author, and filmmaker, trained at the Academy of Applied Arts in his home city of Prague and continues to work in a recognizably Czech idiom. The mingling of subject and style—an example of what Katie Trumpener calls “cross-pollination” facilitated by immigrant artists (2009, 58)—lends the book its aura of cultural hybridity.4 Second, on the level of characterization, Madlenka is defined by her curiosity and openness; she embraces her encounters in the mélange of different cultures and ethnic groups living on her block. Sís’s flâneuse is a true cosmopolitan who displays a number of the constituent predispositions and practices identified by Bronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry:

• extensive mobility, in which people have the right to “travel” cor- poreally, imaginatively and virtually ...; • the capacity to consume many places and environments en route; • a curiosity about many places, peoples and cultures ...; • a willingness to take risks by virtue of encountering the “other”; ... • an openness to other peoples and cultures and a willingness/ability to appreciate some elements of the language or culture of the “other.”

(Szerszynski and Urry 2006, 114–15, emphasis in original)

IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Madlenka is not defined as a character in terms of national belonging; the book does not focus on her national or ethnic identity in order, say, to underscore the differences between the child and her neighbors. Instead of privileging a single, predominant, homogenous culture, the book suggests that the cultures on her ethnically diverse block reflect both the reality and the ideal of American urban culture. The girl is immersed in the block’s multicultural and multilingual environment, an environment where her neighbors know her well enough to greet her in their own languages and address her as Madeleine, Madela, Maddalena, Magda, Magdalena, and Mandala. It is an unusually inclusive example of a tour book, a genre that has traditionally sought to introduce young readers, explicitly or implicitly, to the specific cultures of which they are becoming a part by describing many ones to which they will never belong. The Victorian Evangelical Christian xenophobia of Favell Lee Mortimer’s Far Off guides to Asia, SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 7

Australia, Africa, and the United States of the 1850s (Mortimer 2005) seems to have been put behind us once and for all. A culture is about shared meanings, and it depends on its participants “making sense of the world, in broadly similar ways” (Hall 1997, 2). To do this, they must share the same codes, “sets of concepts, images and ideas which enable them to think and feel about the world, and thus to interpret the world, in roughly similar ways” (4). The participants within any given culture must, if they are to communicate successfully with one another, speak the same language in the widest sense of that meaning; but they must also be able to use the same linguistic codes and to decode visual images in more or less the same manner. Representation is therefore closely tied to both identity and knowledge. Indeed, as Stuart Hall claims,

it is difﬁcult to know what ‘being English,’ or indeed French, German, South African or Japanese, means outside of all the ways in which our ideas and images of national identity or national cultures have been represented. Without these ‘signifying’ systems, we could not take on such identities (or indeed reject them) and consequently could not build up or sustain that common ‘life-world’ which we call a culture. (5, emphasis in original)

Narratives produced by a culture are models by which a society both conceives and articulates a view of itself, as Graeme Turner argues in his study of Australian literature and ﬁlm. They do not simply reﬂect the culture; they also make sense of experience and help explain the culture to itself (Turner 1986, 9). These ideas are particularly pertinent to children’s literature, which belongs to the signifying systems that enable the young to take on identities. One of its major functions has been, and still is, the socialization and enculturation of children:

The texts produced by a culture for children ...have a critical role in mediating that culture to its young participants. Insofar as children’s texts seek to enculturate their readers within mainstream society, these texts are an index of the ways that the dominant images of the culture are ideologi- cally reshaped.” (McCallum 1997, 114)

Because (children’s) literature is a signifying system that gives a culture a sense of who any given “we” is and with whom this “we” belongs, it is involved with questions of “how culture is used to mark out and maintain 8 E. O’SULLIVAN AND A. IMMEL identity within and difference between groups” (Hall 1997, 3). Autostereotypes and heterostereotypes are constitutive to its construction; social psychology has recognized the function of these images of self and others (also known as ingroup[us]–outgroup[them] distinctions) to define and delimit identity—as an individual, as a group, as a nation, and so on. While there is generally a marked tendency to see one’s own group, society, or culture as rich and diverse, the predisposition is to see the “others” as monolithic, with their representatives reduced to a few typical and “different” features. As a part of the discourse of national belonging, children’s literature tells readers about their place in the world, in some cases by impressing upon them who they are not (see the examples in the chapters by Silke Meyer and Gillian Lathey). It goes without saying that the discourse of sameness and difference has political and ideological dimensions, as Martina Seifert and Verena Rutschmann suggest in their chapters. As many of the contributions to this volume show, the notion of difference is central to the cultural encounters in children’s literature, whether actual or imagined (see the chapters by Gabriele von Glasenapp, Amanda M. Brian, and Lara Saguisag). At the same time, there is a strong rhetorical tradition of internationalism in children’s literature discourse from the Enlightenment (the chapters by Nina Christensen and Cynthia J. Koepp offer Danish and French examples) to the present day; instead of emphasizing the idea of children belonging to specific ethnic or national groups, these narratives stress the sameness of children throughout the world and cast childhood itself as a utopian space that transcends all borders and erases all differences.5 However, this ideal does not always translate into actual representations of sameness in texts for children, and it can result in mixed messages or what can be called “ambivalent internationalism” (O’Sullivan 2011). There may also be a clash between a genuine wish to show children how the world “is” or how it might be and the discursive contexts in which the literature develops. In her discussion of an ethnographic exhibition from the 1990s, Henrietta Lidchi identifies the discourse of European imperial superiority, whereby “the relationship between scientific knowledge (anthropology), popular culture, the geography of power (colonialism) and visibility (photographs, display)” is rendered in a particularly overt manner (1997, 197). Similarly, in this volume in her account of publications for children arising from the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, Gillian Lathey highlights a SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 9 tension between “a public rhetoric of internationalism and peace and theuseofreductivestockimagesorquasi-anthropological categories.”

REPRESENTATION Figure 1.1 is characteristic of Sís’s work, with its visual interplay between frames, perspectives, and patterning that shapes meaning. Madlenka, in bright crayon colors against a large white background and with a curious look on her face, is posed in the center of the page, surrounded by an aerial 360° view of her block, flattened in the style of an architectural schematic design.6 (This image of Madlenka is the one that will be visible through the die-cut windows on the three following spreads). Only three elements are colored on the block, and they mark the three places she will visit next: Mr. Singh’s newspaper stand under the purple awning, in the center to the right, Mr. Ciao’s ice-cream truck striped like the Italian flag, in the upper right corner, and Ms. Grimm’s house with the green window, two doors down from the corner, at the top. The third and outermost frame has a dual purpose. It is used as a space for mapping Madlenka’s grand tour from her apartment building and back home again. On this stage of her journey, she visits two friends—Mr. Singh, an Indian Sikh, and the Italian Mr. Ciao, who operate small businesses with which immigrants from their countries are often associated in the United States. Her third visit is to Ms. Grimm, who, as her name indicates, is a storyteller, a keeper of cultural memory. The outer frame is also used as a space to arrange the simple sketches of ethnographic items keyed to each neighbor’s “signal” color, which also dominate in the respective fantasyscapes. For example, a cat, a slice of pizza, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and spaghetti decorate Mr. Ciao’s side, while Ms. Grimm’s side is filled with intertextual illustrations of figures from German fairy tales and stories. Interactivity is encouraged: the reader must turn the book on its side and upside down to read the captions accompanying the pictures. What questions need to be asked of the discursive context when examining these types of representation of other nationalities/cultures/ethnic groups in literature? A growing branch of literary study, imagology, is dedicated to understanding the “cultural construction and literary representation of national characters” (the subtitle of the definitive handbook on the subject by Beller and Leerssen [2007]), and it informs the chapters by Silke Meyer, Gillian Lathey, Martina Seifert, and Emer O’Sullivan. This introduction will discuss the questions that can and should be asked of the 10 E. O’SULLIVAN AND A. IMMEL texts and contexts in which representations of difference are presented to young readers. They can be schematically reduced to: who is seeing, what (or who) is seen, and how are they represented, and (potentially) why are they represented in this way? Further questions relate to the nature of the audience and of the media, forms, or genres in which the representations take place.

Who Is Seeing? This question leads to the heart of the political dimension of representation, the question of the relationships between perspective and agency and discursive power. It is the issue at the center of postcolonial studies of those “more written about than writing, more spoken about than speaking” (McGillis 2000, xxi). A central tenet in imagology is that images reveal as much or more about those who are seeing or doing the representing (the spectants) as about those seen or represented (the spected). The dynamics between “those images which characterize the Other (hetero-images) and those which characterize one’s own domestic identity (self-images or autoimages)” are therefore of particular interest (Leerssen 2007, 27). The question as to who is the gazer or the spectant must be asked on two levels. On the level of the origin of the text: what are its temporal and cultural contexts? In other words, where and when did the observation and representation occur, and in what way are the wider political and social discourses of the time reflected in the representation? Also pertinent is the question of who speaks: do “nations,”“cultures,”“ethnic groups,” or their representatives articulate themselves in a dialogic manner, or does someone else speak on their behalf? The chapter by Cynthia J. Koepp furnishes an unusual example of an educational drama in which nations are personified and putatively speak in the first person. The spectant perspective is European, or specifically French, but it tries, in an act of (predominantly) empathetic cultural ventriloquism, to script how other nations might present themselves, speak for themselves, and defend themselves against prejudice. Who is seeing in Madlenka, this utopian vision of multiculturalism in which the neighbors function as personifications of their original cultures while being, at the same time, an integral part of a New York city block? Published in the United States and written by a Czech immigrant, the picturebook can be situated in the context of a general interest in multiculturalism and cultural diversity in American children’s literature during SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 11 the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.7 In the case of the Russian picturebooks discussed by Verena Rutschmann, for instance, through her account of the cultural and historical issues involved in their genesis and production between 1922 and 1934, she helps us to identify the (political) perspective and recognize in them the transition from the concept of internationalism, the fraternity of socialist working peoples, to Soviet supremacy. The other level of “who is seeing” concerns the narrative perspective. Simply put, if a character in a novel who makes racist utterings has been (negatively) characterized as a racist, then such utterances will or should be assessed differently from ones attributed to a heterodiegetic narrator. Who then sees in Madlenka? The slender verbal text consists mostly of direct speech, so Madlenka and her neighbors speak for themselves in a dialogic text. However, in the outermost frame of the illustration in Fig. 1.1, Madlenka is referred to in the third person. A heterodiegetic narrator describes her movements in the simple syntax that a girl of Madlenka’s age would use: “Ms. Grimm is from Germany and knows many stories.” Although not the first-person narrator, Madlenka would seem to be the focalizer. And what about the perspective of the pictures? The selection, layering, and composition of the details from different perspectives all emanate from a sophisticated, hetereodiegetic illustrator-narrator who has chosen to represent the ethnographic objects associated with each neighbor in the style of a child’s drawings. They can likewise be read as Madlenka’s way of seeing and knowing the world, so she would appear to be the focalizer of the illustrations as well.8 Similarly, the opulent, sweep- ing, and strongly intertextual fantasyscapes could be read as imaginative riffs on ideas Madlenka has picked up from each particular neighbor. The readers are seemingly treated to Madlenka’s vision and perception of foreign cultures rather than being guided by an omniscient hand, purportedly presenting an accurate and authoritative account of them.9

What (or Who) Is Seen? This question touches on issues of selection and coverage: why this country, these nations, or these particular groups?10 If an author has an academic interest in a specific country, for instance, and writes information books for children about that country, then the question may be of merely biographical interest rather than of general cultural relevance. But it may be pertinent to ask whether or why any given 12 E. O’SULLIVAN AND A. IMMEL spected are particularly interesting or relevant for the spectants’ culture at any specific time. If a striking number of texts are published about one country or cultural group at a particular time, what stimu- lated them? An influential factor in the Madlenka selection was perhaps that those ethnic groups are richly represented in New York, where Sís lives and works. But his selection also reflects a Eurocentric sense of cultural geography and as such was deemed “peculiar” by A. O. Scott, who rightly remarked:

France, Italy, Germany and India are ...discrete nations, which Asia and Latin America are not. Eduardo ...speaks Spanish, which is not the language of the largest and most populous country in Latin America. If you asked him—as a curious and friendly child like Madlenka surely would— where would he say he was from? (Would Mr. Gaston say he was from Europe?) And what about Mrs. Kham? Is she Vietnamese? Korean? Chinese? These distinctions matter—surely they would matter to her—and a children’s book that takes its readers on a trip “around the world” would do better to acknowledge them. Scott, (2000)

The question of selection is particularly relevant in the case of two overlapping genres: the many “costumes and manners of nations” books for children of the eighteenth century, and the nineteenth-century ABCs of nations, dolls, babies, soldiers, and so on. While their titles might imply comprehensiveness, they are strictly limited in scope (the wonderfully named A View of the Habits of Most Countries in the World [Anon. 1756] actually depicts costumed representatives from only seventeen “countries”). In this case it can be asked: what principles guide selection—familiarity, exoticism, difference, or do the eco- nomics of bookmaking figure in? By definition, an alphabet book (in English) can have only twenty-six subjects, which, it just so happens, is a perfect fit for a thirty-two-page illustrated pamphlet. Emer O’Sullivan’s chapter discusses the reasons for the selection of the twelve nations portrayed in the colorful print “Costumes of Nations for Infant Schools,” which was designed for classroom use in the early nineteenth century. That the nationalities could easily be characterized by their differences rather than their similarities was an important guiding feature for both the selection and the representation, not least because the figures had to be recognizable from a distance. SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 13

How Are They Represented? In Madlenka, too, each of the neighbors has distinctive and exclusive defining features. The neighbors who embody their countries or regions of origin are characterized primarily by name, language, dress (turban, bowler hat), food and drink (pizza, baguette, green tea), architectural icons (the pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower), manufactured items (Volkswagen Beetle, Zeppelin, samurai sword), religious and mythical elements (Buddhas, Dalai Lama, masks), animals (parrots, lucky dragons, lions), topography (desert, rainforest, jungle, volcano), characters from fairy tales (Hansel and Gretel) and children’s books (Pinocchio, Slovenly Peter), and occupation (French baker, Indian news vendor, Italian ice-cream man, South American grocer, and Asian shop- keeper). Each of the neighbors is a distinct ethnotype—that is, primarily perceived and characterized by their ethnicity (see Leerssen 2012, 5). And each is sufficiently distinguished—or rather, the features used to characterize them are—to underscore difference rather than similarity. It is this difference that underlines the principle of their characterization. These characterizations are consistent with imagology’semphasisthat literature does not so much portray cultural identity as present cultural difference in the form of attributes that allow one nation to be perceived as different from the others. Representations of others are governed “by the implicit aprioripresupposition that anationismostitselfinthoseaspects wherein it is most unlike the others” (Leerssen 2003, emphasis in original). As Joep Leerssen observes, this presupposition “restricts identity to particularism and exoticism, and precludes us from realizing that all our identities define us as part of, and not in contradistinction to, humanity as a whole” (ibid.). When imagologists examine a literary representation, they are interested not in whether a particular description is true but in whether it is convincing and plausible, and how it has come to be recognizable. The object of inquiry concerns recognizability rather than validity. Images are studied “not as items of information about reality, but as properties of their context” (ibid., emphasis in original). They are investigated as rhetorical and discursive elements, and are taken to be highly intertextual in nature. Familiar images of nations belong to what Umberto Eco calls “common frames” and “intertextual frames” in literature (1979,20). These intertextually recognizable stereotypes are a kind of “literary shorthand” (see O’Sullivan 1989,57),whichtriggersamoreorless preprogrammed actualization of associations. This property invests 14 E. O’SULLIVAN AND A. IMMEL stereotypes with a decidedly aesthetic potential. Although imagology has paid lip service to the poetological and rhetorical dimension of images, it has not yet sufficiently addressed the potentially different literary functions of elements from the repertoires and archives of representations when drawn on in literary texts. These would include, for instance, the use of such iconographic elements as hands in pockets and smoking as hallmarks of Dutchmen in eighteenth-century popular prints (as discussed in Silke Meyer’s chapter), or the endless wilderness of Canada as an adventure playground, training ground, or spiritual refuge in successive periods of German literature (as analyzed by Martina Seifert). Instrumentalization of images for propaganda or ideological purposes is one form of functionalizing stereotypes (see the chapter by Verena Rutschmann); others occur in specifically educational contexts, such as the preparation of European children for their future role in “civilizing missions” in Africa through discourses on race (as Cynthia J. Koepp’s chapter shows).

Why Are They Represented that Way? “Foreigners” are sometimes made to personify what the spectant group does not want to include in its self-image. Partly envious of the fashion, elegance, and artistry of the French, the British twisted these traits to construct the figure of the fop in the eighteenth century—aristocratic, aesthetic, fickle, superficial, and effeminate. The French were emphatically not what the British self-image purported to be: sober, reliable, and industrious. This image of France was central to British self-definition during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see the chapters by Silke Meyer and Emer O’Sullivan). “Foreigners” wereandareoftenutilizedinliteratureforcomic purposes, especially (although not exclusively) on the stage; in illustrated material, there is a long tradition of satire and caricatures (see Silke Meyer) and of straight comedy (see Lara Saguisag). But the comedy provided by “foreigners” or “others” is not exhausted in these uses. Ethnotypes and stock characters can be humorously deployed against the grain to make fun of prevalent hierarchies (see the chapter by Amanda M. Brian), and comic and surprise elements can be generated by members of ethnic groups behaving contrary to expectation and refusing to fulfill their expected “role.” Ethnotypical characterization can be made thematic and can be assigned a function, SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 15 such as a narrative one, beyond characterization. Owing to their quasi- stenographic nature, where mention of one characteristic can call up other associations, ethnotypes are rich material for playing with and challenging readers’ expectations and repertoires. Whether these functions can be realized by children who are still in the process of acquiring these elements of their cultures leads to the question of audience.

Audience How do authors make a world, and how do they present that world to children who are in the process of acquiring knowledge about it? In Madlenka, Sís suggests that the girl “knows” everything about all the countries/cultures on her block. It is of course Sís who is showing young readers how culturally rich and diverse their immediate environment may be while, at the same time, he is playing with the idea that they may believe they can know the world by just recognizing bits of shorthand for different countries and regions. It is a double-edged game: Sís employs these images while at the same time inviting us to smile at Madlenka’s reduced vision of the world. Readers older than Madlenka can perceive the girl’s limited vision; at the same time, this is how the artist Sís is presenting the world to children. He manages to counteract the (necessarily) reduced forms of representation through the dual layers of the (predictable) shop- front and simple icons and the exciting associations in the fantasyscape. Readers are shown that the ethnotype of the Frenchman does not exhaust itself in his boulangerie; that looking behind the scenes leads to a rich hinterland, which invites readers to call up their “knowledge” to add to potentially new dreamscapes.

Media, Forms, and Genres Sís exploits the possibilities of the picturebook as a hybrid form to present a culturally diverse neighborhood in two ways. First, he adapts his style to incorporate elements of the styles of the different cultures in order to capture their essence in each of the dreamscapes; and, second, he plays with perspective and angle of vision to show how Madlenka’s world within the block morphs as she circumnavigates it. Older pictorial accounts that included several nations—for instance, the eighteenth- and nineteenth- century compendia of costumes and manners, and the ABC books of 16 E. O’SULLIVAN AND A. IMMEL nations mentioned above—presented a static view, with the representatives exhibited sequentially as quasi-statues. While these books created an overarching reason to examine the images, the individual figures were actually presented out of context. Most modern picturebooks try to find a more inflected way to present different nationalities, not just as statues or costumes. Sís has created an exemplary modern artistic artifact to contain his story of a small girl who embraces her culturally and ethnically diverse natural habitat; its form facilitates a dynamic account of the cosmopolitan Madlenka’s grand tour. When analyzing images, it is essential to contextualize them within the medium, form, or genre in which they occur to allow for the generic conventions and techniques that are deployed in the different types of text (fictional, narrative, poetic, dramatic, visual, non-fictional). An awareness of genre-specific conventions, techniques, and potential restrictions is essential to be able to assess adequately the textual deployment of any given image. Take, for instance, an image of a “Chinaman” in a rhyming alphabet of nations. A study that focuses solely on the image of the Chinese in children’s literature might possibly criticize the reduced and compromised account that characterizes that nation in four rhyming lines. However, if no nation is allocated more than a quatrain, the interesting line of inquiry is to ask how the other nations fared, as well as how they are defined in relation to one another. The image and the text are not adequately addressed if the aspects of generic restriction and interrelation are ignored. While illustrated genres have lent themselves to humor involving human differences (see the chapters by Silke Meyer, Amanda M. Brian, and Lara Saguisag), identity and difference can be negotiated and presented in a more sustained and differentiated manner in extensive narrative fiction, including adventure novels (see Martina Seifert’s contribution) and historical fiction (see Margaret R. Higonnet’s chapter). The latter, which rehearses and renarrates events from the past and commem- orates historical events, has a special role in creating and maintaining a sense of selfhood through historical remembrance and cultural memory (see Rigney 2007).11

THE CHAPTERS In Madlenka we find space compression akin to what John Urry refers to as the “time-space compression” (2002, 141), which results when people all over the globe are brought closer by the corporeal travel of SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 17 tourists, business people, and migrants, by virtual travel via the Internet, social media, and other digital means, and by imaginative travel offered through film,radio,andtelevision.Urryidentifies how traffic in all these forms advanced in the 1990s; but, in fact, space compression is not a singular phenomenon of the late twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, too, the world seemed to shrink, thanks to improved communications and transportation that facilitated travel for commerce, conquest, and leisure. Children’sbookswerethen a major source of imaginative travel for so-called armchair or “tarry-at- home travellers,” in particular the lively and deservedly popular early nineteenth-century series of tour books written by Isaac Taylor (the Scenes in series, including those on Africa, America, Asia, and Europe) and Priscilla Wakefield (The Juvenile Travellers, or A Tour Through the Principal States and Kingdoms of Europe). The chapters in this volume address examples of children’s literature that offer different models of presentation of foreigners, from the (genre- specific) static exhibitions in caricatures and educational prints (Silke Meyer, Emer O’Sullivan), through dynamic geography in dramatic performance (Cynthia J. Koepp), to ethnicity acted out in comics and picturebooks (Gillian Lathey, Amanda M. Brian, Lara Saguisag). The texts negotiate the tensions between the ideal of internationalism as a legacy of the Enlightenment and the constructions of discrete national and ethnic identities cultivated since the growth of nationalism in the Romantic era. They provide examples of ethnocentric cultural perspectives (Gillian Lathey) and ones of cultural relativism (Nina Christensen, Gabriele von Glasenapp, Cynthia J. Koepp), of images that have been produced for pleasure reading (Gillian Lathey, Amanda M. Brian, Lara Saguisag) and ones that have been instrumentalized in the service of ideology and propaganda (Martina Seifert, Verena Rutschmann). But other chapters also consider texts that grant the child reader agency in discussions about how they might become tolerant members of a transnational community (Nina Christensen, Gabriele von Glasenapp). The chapters engage with material from Britain, France, Denmark, Germany, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Discourses from several cultures give a more diverse account of cultural representation and its specific relativity, but also illustrate issues common to representations of difference across borders. They cover a range of fictional and non-fictional forms, visual and non-illustrated texts from popular prints through educational prints, magazines, picturebooks, comics, educational drama, adventure literature, 18 E. O’SULLIVAN AND A. IMMEL novels, and information books. The chapters are grouped in three thematic sections: Ethnography on Display; Internationalism and Tolerance; and Constructing Self and Nation. These flag major—if not exclusive—concerns, and of course there are overlaps. Each chapter has already been referenced in the general discussion above; what follows here is a sketch of the contents to facilitate orientation.

Ethnography on Display National stereotypes in eighteenth-century popular prints introduced British children to the visual discourse of sameness and difference. Silke Meyer (Chapter 2) discusses their function in introducing young spectators to their cultural contexts and conventions of seeing. She analyzes the prints’ mechanisms of reduction, contrast, and classification of physical habits and features according to nationality, especially those featuring images of the French, the Dutch, and the German, whose negative portrayal as “other” elevated the English self-image. Nationality is presented in the prints as propaganda, entertainment, and instruction. At the center of Emer O’Sullivan’s(Chapter 3) deliberations are two prints produced for an educational aid in Britain in the 1830s: “Climates of the Earth” and “Costumes of Nations for Infant Schools.” Using an approach grounded in imagology, she shows how these prints reflect the social and political discourses of their time and then examines the origins and intertextual traditions of the ethnotypical images. She concludes with examples of recreational stories for children that contest the kinds of image presented in the prints. The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London offered children the opportunity to encounter other peoples in person and in various forms, such as dolls in ethnic costume. Gillian Lathey (Chapter 4) shows how representations of these encounters in publications for children direct the child’s response by situating both figures and artifacts within contemporary imperial and scientific discourse during the consolidation of the British Empire and the establishment of the science of anthropology. The German illustrator Lothar Meggendorfer explored complexities of race and class through humorous pictures and texts in the age of early German nationalism and high European imperialism. Amanda M. Brian (Chapter 5) parses out the widely circulated central European and non- SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 19

European caricatures and portraits in his children’s books and magazine illustrations from the last two decades of the nineteenth century to show how he both enforced and mocked contemporary hierarchies of race and class for the ready consumption of children and adults.

Internationalism and Tolerance In her account of how Enlightenment ideas of tolerance and universalism found expression in eighteenth-century Danish magazines for children, Nina Christensen (Chapter 6) reveals how their publishers aimed to educate children to become members of a family, of bourgeois society, and of the nation-state, as well as tolerant citizens of the world. They exhorted children not to categorize people on the basis of wealth, gender, race, religious belief, or age. The address to child readers as individuals with agency highlights a close relationship between the magazine as a medium and Enlightenment ideas of childhood and Bildung. Girls are the addressees of an entertaining play written by the enlightened French anthropologist Louis-François Jauffret to teach them about geography. As Cynthia J. Koepp (Chapter 7) explains, girls were to personify various countries of the world in the dialogues of his Geographie dramatique (1807), engaging in exchanges that seemingly affirm the common humanity of all the people of the world and teach tolerance and respect for difference. However, as she shows, acceptance has limits when it comes to Africans; the dialogues subtly imply that young Europeans should ready themselves for global commercial adventures and “civilizing missions” to come. The difference constructed in the illustrated information books gathered by Gabriele von Glasenapp (Chapter 8) is not national or (primarily) ethnic but religious. She examines volumes published in Germany in the last decade of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first centuries that present the religions of the world, and identifies a striking difference between the information given in the verbal text and that in the illustrations. While the former strives to be objective and to promote tolerance, the pictures often reduce the representatives of religions to types, emphasizing their otherness or exotic character. This tendency is an interesting, presumably inadvertent, variation on the kind of text– image interaction usually exploited creatively as part of a poetological program in fictional picturebooks. As the only chapter on information 20 E. O’SULLIVAN AND A. IMMEL books, von Glasenapp’s contribution also probes and questions the status such texts enjoy in terms of authority and perceived veracity.

Constructing Self and Nation According to Lara Saguisag (Chapter 9), the short-lived cartoon series On the Sidewalks of New York, published in New York in the late 1890s, is a significant cultural artifact that expresses American anxieties about childhood and city life at the turn of the twentieth century. The Progressive Era’s ambivalence regarding the figure of the immigrant street child as both symptom and cause of urban ills is evidenced in the series. At the same time, the humorous situations encouraged readers to sympathize with this “Bad Boy” and enjoy his antics. Verena Rutschmann (Chapter 10) addresses the constructions of Soviet national and civic identity presented to Russian-speaking children in the heyday of innovative colored picturebooks, from 1922 to 1934. She examines Russian autostereotypes and the representation of foreign nations and non-Russian ethnic groups within the Soviet Union, identify- ing the models they conveyed of relations between Russians and other nationalities. Her chapter traces the transition from the concept of a modern, rational citizen to that of a disciplined, devoted subject of the Soviet Union, as well as the simultaneous transition from the concept of internationalism, or the fraternity of peoples, to Soviet supremacy. In her imagological study, Martina Seifert (Chapter 11) shows how the image of another nation can be instrumentalized to satisfy the changing needs and self-images of the producing culture. In three periods of twentieth-century German history—the Weimar Republic, National Socialism, and the postwar era—Canada constantly served as a counterimage for Germans. While the heteroimages retain an extraordinary homogeneity, their appropriation in the different periods is strikingly different. The Canadian wilderness serves as an adventure playground, a trial battlefield for the Aryan race, and finally a place of spiritual and ecological healing. Margaret R. Higonnet (Chapter 12) juxtaposes two novels by women authors to argue that, in response to the American Revolution and the Franco-Prussian War, nineteenth-century fictions for young readers linked voyages of traumatized children to the shaping of a nation. She shows how both authors project new nations as non-violent, imagined communities in texts that map difference, cultural memory, and the invention of a “national family.” SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 21

Greater familiarity with the complex history of representing sameness and difference to children changes how we ultimately respond to contemporary works, such as Sís’s imaginative synthesis of word and image, information and human interest in Madlenka. On the one hand, he succeeded in finding a seriously playful non-judgmental way to present New York City’s diversity by using, as the focalizer, a curious child to whom difference is no barrier to friendship. But we must ask to what extent the credibility of Sís’s magical thinking depends upon that innocent eye to convey the picturebook’s idealistic expression of what should be. If a teenager were substituted for Madlenka, could the book be criticized rightly for having oversimplified how older children experience sameness and difference in a similar setting? And what of the layers of formal play in the illustrations? As impressive as the postmodern drawings of turning the block inside out and upside down as Madlenka goes around the neighborhood are, they face illustrations of exotically dressed figures posed against backdrops that point to their countries of origin, reminiscent of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antecedents. How will the child make sense of any of the double-page spreads with the see-through pages exposing mysterious views of the dreamscapes that follow? The artist has delegated to the adult reader the difficult task of interpreting, for the young viewer, the neighbors’ cultures via the succession of interrelated illustrations: if the adult is at a loss to explain the intertextual allusions packed into the sequences, how much information about any of the cultures will the child take away from Madlenka?Doesthe brilliant design concept risk failure because Sís chose not to compose explanatory texts to accompany the illustrations? Or has he succeeded against the odds where other creators of heavily illustrated introductions to the peoples of all nations have foundered? This volume, we hope, will stimulate questions such as these and heighten awareness of how challenging it always has been and will continue to be to introduce ideas of sameness and difference to children.

NOTES 1. For a discussion of the interesting, but unknown, story by Ives Hurry, see the post “The Good Slave and Her Master as Object Lessons in 1790s England,” published February 19, 2016, on the curatorial blog of the Cotsen Children’s Library (http://blogs.princeton.edu/cotsen). 2. New York is explicitly named in the paratexts, both on the dust cover and in Sís’s dedication at the end of the book to his wife, Terry, daughter, 22 E. O’SULLIVAN AND A. IMMEL

Madeleine (Madlenka), and son, Matej, all of whom, it says, were born there (Sís 2000). The book is not paginated. 3. Sís’s work in general reveals a fascination with maps and cartography; a 2014 exhibition of his work at the Czech Center in New York was aptly titled “Cartography of the Mind”. 4. Added to this is the contextual information that in Madlenka Sís reflects not only on his own status as a migrant in New York by portraying people from all over the world who have made that city their home, but also on how the childhoods of his children, who can freely mingle with people from different countries and cultures, contrast greatly with his own in (then communist) Prague, where “people really wouldn’t speak to each other because they were just simply afraid to—just—the political regime and climate was terrible” (Sís 2010, 3.37–45). 5. O’Sullivan (2017) historicizes the concept of the essential sameness of children, traces its occurrence in more recent debates, and links it to contemporary discussions of constructions of childhood. 6. Trumpener writes: “Sís reconciles apparently disparate genres within exposi- tory picturebooks: sketchbook experiments in perspective and cross-section; city planning books; panoramas. What enables fresh perception, paradoxically, is an immersion in much older visual conventions, and awareness of the palimpsestic layers of urban spaces” (2009,65). 7. A. O. Scott speaks of the “whimsical, well-intentioned multiculturalism” in Madlenka (2000). 8. Another key to the childish nature of these pictures could lie in what Sís told children in an interview in 1995: “Because I have been in this country for only ten years, I see things much like a ten-year-old child, like people waving for taxis and riding in elevators. I did not see this in Prague” (Puma and Ng 1995). 9. Although Madlenka is the agent who discovers the world through her neighbors, the satellite perspective at the beginning of the book, which focuses on her from outer space before zooming in through the different levels, might suggest that she is not only a gazer but also a gazee, under surveillance. 10. Beyond addressing the nationality or ethnic identification of the spected, it is also worth asking whether the spected is an adult or a child, and what implications might be involved. Is there generally a supposition that adults are more “fixed” in their ethnic or national “identity” than children? In her chapter, Lara Saguisag argues that the cartoon series On the Sidewalks of New York, which reflects tensions between the Irish and other cultural groups at the time of its publication at the end of the nineteenth century, differentiates between the ethnic adult and the ethnic child. The latter is presented as a figure to sympathize with and is less threatening than the adult because the child is still malleable and could potentially assimilate. SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 23

11. Sanne Parlevliet (2015) illustrates an interesting intersection of two relevant discourses for national education when she shows how Dutch historical ﬁction for children written between 1914 and 1935 initially held on to the traditional gloriﬁcation of nationality, but then (at least partially) aligned itself with the prevalent educational discourse of tolerance by sometimes framing battles in the spirit of peace education.

REFERENCES

Primary Sources Anon. 1756. A View of the Habits of Most Countries in the World. London: Joseph Hawkins. Ganeshram, R. 2016. A Birthday Cake for George Washington. Illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton. New York: Scholastic. Ives Hurry, M. M. 1795. Goodness Not Conﬁned to Complexion or Form. In Tales of Instruction and Amusement. London: E. Newbery. Mortimer, F. L. 2005. The Clumsiest People in Europe, or, Mrs. Mortimer’s Bad- Tempered Guide to the Victorian World, ed. Todd Pruzan. New York: Bloomsbury. Oncle Hansi [Jean-Jacques Waltz]. 1914. Mon village, ceux qui noublient pas. Paris: H. Floury. Oncle Hansi [Jean-Jacques Waltz]. 1920. L’Alsace heureuse. Paris: H. Floury. Schachner, J. 2003. Skippyjon Jones. New York: Dutton Children’s Books. Sís, P. 2000. Madlenka. New York: Frances Foster Books.

Secondary Sources Beller, M., and J. Leerssen (eds.). 2007. Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Eco, U. 1979. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press. Hall, S. 1997. Introduction. In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. S. Hall, 1–14. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage in association with the Open University. Leerssen, J. 2003. National Identity and National Stereotype. In Images. http:// www.imagologica.eu/leerssen (accessed December 14, 2015). Leerssen, J. 2007. Imagology: History and Method. In Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey, ed. M. Beller and J. Leerssen, 17–32. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. 24 E. O’SULLIVAN AND A. IMMEL

Leerssen, J. 2012. Ethnotypen sind Akteure: Zur Poetik und Rhetorik des Vorurteils. In Wir und die Anderen: Stereotypen in der Schweiz. 27. Kolloquium (2011) der Schweizerischen Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften, ed. B. Engler, 5–20. Fribourg: Academic Press Fribourg. Lidchi, H. 1997. The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures. In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. S. Hall, 151–222. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage in association with the Open University. McCallum, R. 1997. Cultural Solipsism, National Identities and the Discourse of Multiculturalism in Australian Picturebooks. Ariel 28(1): 101–16. McGillis, R. 2000. Introduction. In Voices of the Other: Children’s Literature and the Postcolonial Context, ed. R. McGillis, xix–xxxii. New York, London: Garland Publishing. O’Sullivan, E. 1989. Das ästhetische Potential nationaler Stereotypen in literarischen Texten: Auf der Grundlage einer Untersuchung des Englandbildes in der deutschsprachigen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur nach 1960. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag. O’Sullivan, E. 2011. The Same But Different: Ambivalent Internationalism in Early Twentieth-Century Children’s Books. Princeton University Library Chronicle 72(3): 683–712. O’Sullivan, E. 2017. Discourses of Internationalism in Children’s Literature. In Child Governance and Autonomy in Children’s Literature: Where Children Rule, ed. C. Kelen and B. Sundmark, 30–42. New York: Routledge. Parlevliet, S. 2015. Fiction for Peace? Domestic Identity, National Othering and Peace Education in Dutch Historical Novels for Children, 1914–1935. International Research in Children’s Literature 8(1): 17–30. Puma, J., and B. Ng. 1995. On the Job with Peter Sís [interview]. http://www. zuzu.org/sisinterview.html (accessed December 8, 2015). Rigney, A. 2007. Memory. In Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey, ed. M. Beller and J. Leerssen, 360–63. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Scott, A. O. 2000. In the Universe, On a Planet, On a Block. New York Times Book Review, November 19. https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/19/ reviews/001119.19scottt.html (accessed December 14, 2015). Sís, P. 2010. Video Interview with Reading Rockets “Meet the Author.” https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=LovauoreX_k (accessed December 8, 2015). Szerszynski, B., and J. Urry. 2006. Visuality, Mobility and the Cosmopolitan: Inhabiting the World from Afar. British Journal of Sociology 57(1): 113–31. Trumpener, K. 2009. Picturebook Worlds and Ways of Seeing. In The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, ed. M. O. Grenby and A. Immel, 55–75. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 25

Turner, G. 1986. National Fictions: Literature, Film, and the Construction of Australian Narrative. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Ungerer, T. 1998. A Childhood under the Nazis. Boulder, CO: Tomico. Urry, J. 2002. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. London: Sage.

Emer O’Sullivan, Professor of English Literature at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany, has published widely in both German and English on image studies, children’s literature, and translation, and has received international recognition for her pioneering work in comparative children’s literature. Kinderliterarische Komparatistik (Winter, 2000) won the biennial IRSCL Award for outstanding research in 2001, and Comparative Children’s Literature (Routledge, 2005) won the Children’s Literature Association 2007 Book Award. Historical Dictionary of Children’s Literature (Scarecrow Press) came out in 2010, and a book on children’s literature in foreign-language teaching, Kinder- und Jugendliteratur im Fremdsprachenunterricht (co-authored with Dietmar Rösler [Stauffenburg]), in 2013.

Andrea Immel has been Curator of the Cotsen Children’s Library since 1997. Among her publications are Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe (co-edited with Michael Witmore [2006]); Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War (co-edited with Elizabeth Goodenough [2008]); and The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature (co-edited with M. O. Grenby [2009]). She also contributed the chapters on children’s books in the ﬁfth and sixth volumes of the Cambridge History of the Book and The Oxford Companion to the Book. Her most recent publication is a scholarly facsimile edition of Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book, the ﬁrst collection of English nursery rhymes (with Brian Alderson [2013]). PART I

Ethnography on Display CHAPTER 2

Learning to See: Eighteenth-Century Children’s Prints and the Discourse of Othering

Silke Meyer

Seeing is a practice that requires neurologicalaswellasculturaltrain- ing (Meyer and Sprenger 2011). We know from perception physiology that the act of seeing involves learning a physical sequence. From the very beginning of our lives, we have to train our eyes so that we reverse the image projected onto our retina by external stimuli. Growing up, we quickly learn other techniques, such as deciphering faces as friendly or unfriendly. Facial recognition is particularly well researched in neurobiology: the Thatcher effect experiment shows that we can recognize facial expressions instantly, but only if they are the “right” way up. When faces are turned upside down, expression and intention become much more difﬁcult to decode (Thompson 1980; Bruce and Young 2000,158–9). Cultural practices of seeing, on the other hand, are historically speciﬁc. A famous example of learning to see in a new way is the development of panoramic perception in response to railway travel. Early nineteenth-century passengers had to become visually accustomed to looking out of the

S. Meyer (*) University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

© The Author(s) 2017 29 E. O’Sullivan, A. Immel (eds.), Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8_2 30 S. MEYER window when the train was traveling at full speed. The fast-moving and blurred foreground made some travelers feel overstimulated and physically ill. In a letter dated August 22, 1837, the French poet Victor Hugo described his train experience:

The flowers by the side of the road are no longer flowers but flecks, or rather streaks, of red or white; there are no longer any points, everything becomes a streak; the grain fields are great shocks of yellow hair; fields of alfalfa, long green tresses; the towns, the steeples, and the trees perform a crazy, mingling dance. (quoted in Schivelbusch 1986,55–6)

Rail travelers had to learn to adapt to the unanticipated demands of panoramic perception and direct their gaze into the middle ground. With this new skill, when seeing the surroundings “through the apparatus which moved him through the world,” when “the machine and the motion it created became integrated into his visual perception,” when he “could only see things in motion” (Schivelbusch 1986, 64), the traveler started to appreciate the panorama of a rolling landscape. As an American visitor to Britain observed in a letter home: “The beauties of England ...never appear so charming as when dashing on after a locomotive at forty miles an hour.” The acquired skill of panoramic perception, “destitute of prominent objects to detain the eye,” had made it possible to detect “the charming whole” (quoted in ibid., 60). The body—specifically, the network of the eyes and brain—can be thought of as an interface of image and meaning, of technology and culture, of society and the individual. Much like the landscape viewed from a speeding vehicle, pictures cannot be read unless the viewer has learned the various conventions of representation, as in the following three examples from the history of art. Geometric perspective with one vanishing point was introduced in the Italian Renaissance. Then the enlightened and emancipated Renaissance man engaged with art much more actively, choosing focal points and ignoring minor objects that at first would appear to be distractions from the whole (Wulf 1997, 450). Once this way of seeing has been acquired, it is hard to let it go, which is why early Christian art can be difficult for us to read now. And if Italian Renaissance art was, according to Svetlana Alpers, essentially a “narrative art ...in which human figures performed significant actions based on the text of the poets” (1983, xix), then northern European paintings from the seventeenth century, which favored description with careful attention to surface LEARNING TO SEE: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHILDREN’S PRINTS ... 31 detail, a reflecting rather than defining light, and images unlimited by frames, called for different ways of seeing. Here, the spectator is less precisely situated: the world and its objects exist prior to and outside of their view in color and texture. Lastly, the “scopic regime of modernity” has favored Cartesian perspectivalism, in which space is structured as “isotropic, rectilinear, abstract, and uniform.” Rather than glancing, the viewer gazes at the work as if through a peephole, their visual perspective static, disembodied, and reduced to one “point of view” (Jay 1988,4, 6–7).1 From this modern hegemonial way of seeing, Martin Jay derives a notion of abstract sobriety and de-eroticism of the visual order. These three aesthetic developments have produced culturally shaped ways of showing and seeing, and they demonstrate how art creates particular discursive frameworks for the perception of meaning within each one. The way an object, a figure, a town scene, or a landscape is represented also constitutes meaning beyond the representation itself. It includes the recognition of the same and the familiar as well as intimation of difference in a discourse of othering. In this chapter I focus on one visual discourse of sameness and difference: how representations of national stereotypes reveal the ways culture- specific notions of the self and the other may be acquired. Scholars from many fields—literature studies, art history, sociology, psychology, and cultural and social anthropology—have studied the topic of national stereotypes. Imagology, which “is based upon but not limited to, the inventory and typology of how nations are typified, represented, and/or caricatured in a given tradition or corpus of cultural articulations” (Hoenselaars and Leerssen 2009, 251), usually adopts a constructivist approach to national rhetoric and national character, and emphasizes its intertextuality and the changing significance of tropes, as well as the mechanisms and functions of othering as processes of social inclusion and exclusion.2

PRINT GENRES AND THE ACQUISITION OF IMAGES Visual discourses exist in all kinds of images, not just the culturally valued and aesthetically complex genres of high art. Along with painting, architecture, and sculpture, print genres are also instrumental in the mental acquisition of iconographic grammar, perhaps even more so because of their serial character and their mass distribution. My material comes from a genre with an ambiguous status, low aesthetic value, 32 S. MEYER and misunderstood history: popular prints for children. Popular prints are often labeled as ephemera in museum and library collections, and because their value as primary sources was unclear, the sheets have been largely ignored and usually minimally catalogued. Nor have their history and production been studied in depth.3 However, prints are an essential part of European visual culture and were routinely encountered in many environments, particularly those designed to appeal to children. Thomas Bewick (1753–1828), the great English wood engra- ver and illustrator, recalled the portraits and historical scenes decorat- ing his school dinner room:

These prints, which were sold at a very low price, were commonly illustrative of some memorable exploits—or were, perhaps, the portraits of eminent men who had distinguished themselves in the service of their country, or in their patriotic exertions to serve mankind. ... Amongst others were representations of remarkable victories at sea, and battles on land, often accompanied with portraits of those who commanded, and others who had borne a conspicuous part in these contests with the enemy—the house at Ovingham, where our dinner poke was taken care of when at school, was hung round with views or representations of the battles of Zorndorff, and several others. (Bewick 1975, 192–3)

Children, like adults, gawked at political prints hung in shop windows, as in James Gillray’s famous caricature “Very Slippy Weather” (1808, BM Satires 11100), where a boy stands among the crowd in front of a printer’s premises. Charles Lamb described how in the 1780s he and his friends would gather in front of print shop windows to look at the new publications, and he remembered “these window displays as the only free amusement for the boys in winter time” (Lamb 1903, 14). Children also had the opportunity to look through bound volumes as an amusement—more accurately, a male amusement. William Thackeray recalled that his grandfather’s library in the country had

two or three old mottled portfolios, or great swollen scrap-books of blue paper, full of the comic prints of grandpapa’s time. ... These prints were signed Gillray, Bunbury, Rowlandson, Woodward, and some actually George Cruikshank. ... But if our sisters wanted to look at the portfolios, the good old grandfather used to hesitate.” (Thackeray 1854,78–9) LEARNING TO SEE: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHILDREN’S PRINTS ... 33

It was also possible for people to borrow such portfolios: the printer Thomas Tegg and his colleague S. W. Fores lent out folios of bound caricatures for a shilling apiece (Donald 1996, 4). In addition to the political prints and caricatures intended for a general audience, there were all kinds of prints designed for children’s use. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, various enterprising firms developed and expanded the market for affordable children’s prints on a scale that is quite surprising. In 1717, Henry Overton issued a catalogue promoting “About 500 more several sorts of small plates for children to play with, both coloured and plain” (Overton 1717, 22). The description offers no clues as to how boys and girls would amuse themselves with these prints, so it must have been obvious to prospective purchasers. Overton’s competitors at the lower end of the market, Cluer and William Dicey, advertised that “Country Shop keepers and others may be furnished with all sorts of Broadsheets, Ballads, and Histories, as cheap and much better done than at any Printing-Office in England” (Dicey 1754 [1764], n.p.). The Diceys’ stock included 3,000 ballads, 1,000 prints, and 150 chap- books at a very low price, usually sixpence or less (Stoker 2014, 123–4). For comparison, sixpence would also buy a pound of sugar, a loaf of bread, a crossing of the Thames from Westminster to London Bridge, or a visit to the Tower of London to see the lions (Parker 1777, n.p.). In 1783, two sixpences (i.e. a shilling) could purchase a copy of Thomas Bewick’s illustrated children’s book The History of All Nations (1768) (Christopher 1783, n.p.) or enough gin to get drunk.4 For a shilling, one could also buy restrikes of caricatures by William Hogarth, Henry Bunbury, George Woodward, Thomas Rowlandson, and Isaac and George Cruikshank. All these artists’ satirical work included scenes from everyday life and from politics, and both genres had numerous depictions of foreign nationals. One of the most popular kinds of prints for children were the so-called lotteries: sheets of little images that boys and girls colored, cut up, and pasted in scrapbooks or collected and swapped (O’Connell 1999, 32–3; Immel 2005,66–9). Print sellers’ catalogues might offer hundreds of different lottery sheets for children. One of the firms maintaining a large stock was Bowles & Carver, which promoted its lotteries of “400 different sorts” as

far superior in goodness to any extant, being a new and large collection of small pictures and hieroglyphics, intended to divert and instruct children in 34 S. MEYER

their most tender years, containing the several dignities, stations and conditions among men and women, the various kinds of beasts, birds and ﬁshes; trees, fruits and plants; the seasons of the year, sports, diversions, humours, trades, caricatures; the ways of life, etc. (Bowles 1786, 198)5

NATIONAL STEREOTYPES IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PRINTS Ballads, writing sheets, and lotteries for children were inexpensively produced and made available to a wide audience. The prints about “the several dignities” and “the ways of life” are of particular interest because they represent a corpus of cultural articulations that complemented the educational program designed to prepare the young English middle-class audience for participation in the larger worlds of religion, commerce, society, arts, and nature (Hilton and Shefrin 2009). The images provided knowledge and entertainment alike and lent themselves to a variety of didactic purposes (Immel 2005,69–73). National stereotypes were a common theme for a number of reasons: the representation of different people was supposed to be a pleasant and instructive way of communicating information about foreign lands and their cultures, as well as a source of amusement about the assumed idiosyncrasies and follies of the inhabitants of other nations. And they were effective. Among his grandfather’s print portfolios, Thackeray remembered several caricatures of Napoleon Bonaparte (“Boney”) creating havoc in Europe: “Boney was represented as a fierce dwarf, with goggle eyes, a huge laced hat and tricolored plume, a crooked sabre, reeking with blood: a little demon revelling in lust, murder, and massacre. John Bull was shown kicking him a good deal,” assisted by Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger (“the angelic Pitt”). Also on the English side were “the gallant Turks,”“the excellent and patriotic Spaniards,” and “the amiable and indignant Russians.” Those images on paper, impressed on the boy Thackeray’s mind, formed the matrix of enculturation through the depictions of a morally encoded other: “We hated these vicious wretches, as good children should; we were on the side of Virtue and Pitt and Grandpapa” (Thackeray 1854, 78). The structure of stereotyping, furthermore, parallels the tendency in children’s prints to link different discursive patterns and categories of knowledge with affects and assessment. The comic mode could accom- modate both of them, with the emotional appeal reinforcing educational priorities. Stereotypes thus fulfilled two functions. First, they served as a LEARNING TO SEE: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHILDREN’S PRINTS ... 35 means of orientation in an expanding and increasingly complex world, because they offered fixed criteria for distinguishing the self and the other, the good and the bad, the normal and the odd. They can be seen therefore as providing a cultural answer to individual needs of belonging. Second, the prints as a genre conduced the negotiation of identity by producing an affirmative self-image in response to an adversative image of the other. This contrast was achieved through the mechanisms of selecting an identifiable, but ultimately simplistic or outright false, pars pro toto and attributing it to an entire group (e.g. Bavarian lederhosen came to stand for all Germans). Other techniques of stereotyping reduced, classified, and contrasted visual elements in order both to construct and to evaluate images of foreign nations. Images of national stereotypes therefore represent not only a “grammar of national characterization” (Leerssen 2000, 275) but also a grammar of identity formation. Although national stereotyping was pervasive in English visual culture during the 1700s, with its commentaries on the ongoing wars and related campaigns of propaganda, the reshaping of typologies and systems of classifications into national characters and categories pre-dates the discourse of nation-building in eighteenth-century England. For instance, the Theophrastan types were nationalized in early seventeenth-century English works. While the Greek philosopher Theophrastus described general human attitudes, mentalities, and character traits in “The Flatterer,” “The Boor,” and “The Braggart,” Sir Thomas Overbury recast them in his 1615 character book: the bragging soldier becomes a Welshman; the drunk, a Dutchman; and the cook, a Frenchman. The French chef is extravagantly disparaged as one who

does not feed the belly but the palate. ... he dare not for his life come among the butchers; for sure they would quarter and bake him after the English fashion; hee’s such a enemy to Beefe and Mutton. To conclude, he were onely ﬁt to make a funerall feast, where men should eate their victuals in mourning. (Overbury 1615, n.p.)

In his satirical poem “The True-Born Englishman” (1701), Daniel Defoe assigned each of the seven deadly sins to a nation:6

Pride, the First Peer, and President of Hell, To his share Spain, the largest Province fell ... Lust chose the Torrid Zone of Italy, 36 S. MEYER

Where Blood ferments in Rapes of Sodomy ... Drunk’ness, the Darling Favourite of Hell, Chose Germany to rule; and rules so well. ... Ungoverned Passion settled ﬁrst in France, Where mankind lives in haste, and thrives by chance. A dancing nation, ﬁckle and untrue. Have oft undone themselves, and others too. (Defoe 1997,28–9)

In their works, Overbury and Defoe anticipate the idea that evolved during the eighteenth century of a classifying system that associated geography, climate, humoral types, physical disposition, and appearance with national character. A similar shift can be found in prominent systems of classiﬁcations such as the humoral theory and the climate theory, with its north-south model; all became intertwined with the idea of national character (cf. Zacharasiewicz 1977; Leerssen 2006,52–70).7 A prominent advocate of such a system was Johann Caspar Lavater, who promoted it in his Essays on Physiognomy, ﬁrst published in German in 1772. He merged humoral pathology, physical appearance, and national character, as can be seen in his description of “The Frenchman”:

In the temperament of nations, the French class is that of the sanguine. Frivolous, benevolent, and ostentatious, the Frenchman forgets not his inoffensive parade till old age has made him wise. ... His gait is dancing, his speech without accent, and his ear incurable. ... No other man has so little of the ﬁrm, or deep traits, or so much motion. He is all appearance, all gesture. (Lavater 1853, 357)

OTHERING IN CHILDREN’S POPULAR PRINTS: FOOD,POLITICS, AND GENDER Images of national stereotypes in children’s popular prints serve as potent engines in the process of socialization by providing their juvenile audience with a structure for the recognition and classiﬁcation of self and other. The motif of national stereotypes represents a historic form of enculturation, a structure for teaching how to see the world and understand one’s own role in it. Looking at Bowles & Carver prints such as “O the Roast Beef of Old England” (Fig. 2.1) and “Soup Meagre, Frogs and Sallad” (Fig. 2.2), we can follow the path of political, social, and economic history into the LEARNING TO SEE: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHILDREN’S PRINTS ... 37

Fig. 2.1 “O the Roast Beef of Old England,” printed by Bowles & Carver ca. 1780–1790. Reproduced in Bowles & Carver, Catchpenny Prints: 163 Popular Engravings from the Eighteenth Century (New York: Dover, 1970), no. 123, p. 81. juvenile spectator’s mind through the use of food, a subject that very young children can quickly grasp as a powerful means of distinguishing “us” from “them.” The Englishman in “O the Roast Beef” is drawn as a portly, round- featured ﬁgure in a homely interior who is enjoying a plate piled high with meat, with even more food on the way. The title refers to Hogarth’s famous painting The Gate of Calais; or O the Roast Beef of Old England (1748), whose title was quoted as “The Roast Beef of Old England” by Henry Fielding in his Grub Street Opera (1731) and later reworked by Theodosius Forrest into “The Roast Beef of Old England: A Cantata” in 1759 (Samuelian 2010, 142):

When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman’s food, It ennobled our brains and enriched our blood. Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good 38 S. MEYER

Fig. 2.2 “Soup Meagre, Frogs and Sallad,” printed by Bowles & Carver ca. 1780–1790. Reproduced in Bowles & Carver, Catchpenny Prints: 163 Popular Engravings from the Eighteenth Century (New York: Dover, 1970), no. 123, p. 81.

Oh! the Roast Beef of old England, And old English Roast Beef! But since we have learnt from all-vapouring France To eat their ragouts as well as to dance, We’re fed up with nothing but vain complaisance Oh! the Roast Beef of Old England, And old English Roast Beef!

In the companion print, “Soup Meagre, Frogs and Sallad,” English prosper- ity and freedom are contrasted with French poverty and political oppression. The iconography of the Frenchman is reduced to a fashionable fop with sharp features and mockingly elegant posture. He is as easily identifiable in the more schematic renderings in Bowles & Carver lottery sheets or picture alphabets for teaching reading, such as “Monsieur from Paris” (no. 180) or “Monsieur Francois” (no. 48), as he is in Hogarth’s carefully drawn and detailed painting. In “Soup Meagre,” two haggard Frenchmen sit at a table LEARNING TO SEE: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHILDREN’S PRINTS ... 39 in front of almost empty plates. The lean figure in the foreground points accusingly at the soup tureen, which contains “soup meagre,” a thin, watery potage made from stock with vegetables, no meat, and little fat. Food often features in depictions of national types: here well-marbled meat and beer symbolize the wealth afforded by a solid political and economic system, whereas the lean French cuisine is indicative—from an English perspective—of the poor living conditions in an unstable nation. Although the Frenchmen in the picture are fashionably dressed, with justaucorps coats and wigs with queues, and with a decorative sword leaning prominently against a chair in the foreground, they appear gaunt, their features pinched and emaciated. On such unhealthily thin bodies, the fashionable clothing becomes a show of foppery and frivolity, sending the juvenile spectator a clear message that foreign elegance and fashion are overrated compared with the political and economic stability represented by the hearty Englishman. There is no question as to whom the juvenile spectator is asked to identify with or aspire to be. Another popular motif in such prints is the alleged effeminacy of the fashionable Frenchman, depicted through a deliberately uncomplimentary contrast with the English fish wife, a female type supposed to be burly, brawling, and foul-mouthed. A Bowles & Carver print shows the two in an unequal fight that ends to the detriment of the foreign man. Again, the Frenchman’s clothing is reduced to its decorative aspects: hat, cuffs, and ruffle. In contrast with the full complement of accessories, his bottom is bare and about to be pinched by a lobster held by a second fish wife. His companion stands back, afraid to intervene, while an English butcher laughs heartily in the background. (The hand-colored version of this widespread motif has the Frenchman bleeding from his nose.8)Asifto emphasize her gender, the woman’s breasts are exposed.9 But she, a member of the supposedly weaker sex, is not the main butt of the print’s ridicule. The real message is that even a lower-class English woman is stronger than a French man. The use of binary opposition is particularly clever here: by deploying the apparently non-falsifiable essentialism of gender difference and transferring its evidence onto ethnic difference, otherness becomes a biological fact.10

CONTRAST AS COMPOSITIONAL TECHNIQUE Contrast is the main compositional technique in the depiction of national stereotypes: food, clothes, physical features, and posture all become 40 S. MEYER meaningful through juxtaposition. Famous examples include James Gillray’s “Politeness” (1779), John Nixon’s “Tria Juncta In Uno, or: The Three Enemies of Brittain” (1781), Gillray’s “French Liberty— British Slavery” (1792), and Thomas Rowlandson’s “The Contrast” (1793). These images were reproduced in popular prints, and as inexpen- sive political propaganda they would have been hung up in shops and taverns. They were also used to illustrate wrapping papers for tobacco and for sweets, the latter pointing to a child consumer and, by implication, a spectator. Sheila O’Connell (1999, 28) reproduces an illustration from a tobacco wrapper from the 1760s on the topic of national preferences in tobacco consumption: a gracious Frenchman takes snuff (we can read him saying in a speech bubble, “Voule Vous de Rape,” that is, “Would you like something grated”), a sturdy Dutchman smokes a pipe (“No Dis been Better”), and a bluff Scot chews tobacco (“Will you ha’ a Quid”). The caption reads: “These Three unite in One Cause, This smoaks, that snuffs, the other chaws.” Baseduponthisimage,aBowles&Carverprintcalled“Sailors, English, Dutch, French” is a surprisingly complicated three-way comparison of European difference (Fig. 2.3). The elegant Frenchman, again typecast by his gracious posture and his fashionable clothes, holds what looks like a snuff box. As in the tobacco wrapper, the slim Frenchman’s wide-legged stance is contrasted with the Dutchman’s sturdy body, with both legs parallel and ﬁrmly on the ground. The two ﬁgures seem to echo William Hogarth’sfamous remarks about the S-curve:

Such dispositions of the body and limbs as appear most graceful when seen at rest, depend upon gentle winding contrasts, mostly govern’d by the precise serpentine line, which in attitudes of authority, are more extended and spreading than ordinary, but reduced somewhat below the medium of grace, in those of negligence and ease: and as much exaggerated in insolent and proud carriage, or in distorsions of pain ...as lessen’d and contracted into plain and parallel lines, to express meanness, awkwardness, and submis- sion. (1753, 135)

The Dutchman’s posture—clumsy and ungraceful—corresponds to Hogarth’s “plain and parallel lines” and is entirely consistent with the national stereotype as a down-to-earth, simple countryman. The figure is plainly dressed, with a corpulent build and heavy, fleshy, and unrefined LEARNING TO SEE: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHILDREN’S PRINTS ... 41

Fig. 2.3 “Sailors, English, Dutch, French,” printed by Bowles & Carver ca. 1780–1790. Reproduced in Bowles & Carver, Catchpenny Prints: 163 Popular Engravings from the Eighteenth Century (New York: Dover, 1970), no. 31, p. 19.

features. The depiction of hands stuffed in pockets occurs in a number of images and could be interpreted as a sign of being neutral or indifferent, or even frugal and mean. His pipe serves as a symbol of Holland’s colonial connections throughout the eighteenth century.11 Explanations for this combination of features can be found in the history of Anglo-Dutch relations. From the English point of view, the Netherlands, when in need of assistance against the Spanish during the Dutch War of Independence, took the loyalty of their English ally for granted. Some 200 years later, however, the Dutch failed to live up to their obligation to England during the American War of Independence. The English believed that the Netherlands put trade interests before political loyalty and made the most of their commercial connections with the American colonies.12 This view also features in a geography book for children, A New Moral System of Geography,where the Dutch are described as “brave, industrious, and persevering. But their avarice is so excessive, as to have caused them frequently to barter 42 S. MEYER their national honour for a temporary convenience or emolument” (Riley 1790,66). The main contrast in “Sailors, English, Dutch, French” underscores a positive view of English national identity. Note how, when compared with the plump and awkwardly boorish Dutchman and the overgracious aristocratic Frenchman, the simple and plain Englishman occupies the ideal middle ground. Within the mechanism of stereotyping, the English spectator can construct a positive self-image by recognizing the representations as mockingly exaggerated and contrasting them with a self- perception of modesty, simplicity, and sobriety.

THE GERMAN AS THE ENGLISH ALTER EGO From the English perspective, a very special partner emerged in the eighteenth century from the array of European nations: Germany. Coping with the complex political and cultural relationships between England and Germany was a difﬁcult and tricky business even then. In 1714 “the German cousin” (Camden 1870, 220)—a phrase coined by historian William Camden in 1605—was welcomed on the English throne as George I, his main quality being his Protestant belief or, rather, his non- Catholic confession. The new king, who spoke hardly a word of English, was seen as “the Darling of Mankind” (Moore 1717, n.p.) who “saved us from popery, French slavery and English traitors” (Partridge 1716, n.p.). In the ordinary circumstances of eighteenth-century politics, the English encountered Germans mainly in a military context, either by ﬁghting with them on the Continent or being protected by Hanoverian mercenaries against French invasions. The German was a soldier in the popular mind— strong, brave, and dutiful, always standing at attention. As described for juvenile readers in The History of All Nations,

The Germans have always been a manly and warlike nation, nor is there any country in Europe where there are so numerous arises of horses and foot to be raised, if money be not wanting. The inhabitants when well disciplined, can bear the long fatigues of war, and are very courageous in battle (Bewick 1771, 44)

But there was more to the German nation than courage and martial prowess. Germany was also associated with metaphysical science, mysti- cism, and Romanticism, a place where the magical and eerie could and did LEARNING TO SEE: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHILDREN’S PRINTS ... 43 occur. The origin of this image lies in the fame of one particular German scholar and sorcerer, Dr. Faustus, who was well known in England even before Christopher Marlowe’s play of 1594. Countless ballads, chap- books, and song sheets refer to the man whose tale usually begins with the mention of his nationality: “born in Germany” (Anon. 1750,1)or“At Wertemburgh, a Town in Germany, There was I born and bred of good Degree” (Anon. 1700, n.p.). Illustrations show him surrounded by symbols of scholarship and a cross marking him as a “doctor of divinity” (ibid.), and accompanied by a devilish figure anticipating the vexed story. From the late sixteenth century in England, Dr. Faustus provided the model for many German villains and mad scientists, and the German scenery had become the location for miracles and supernatural incidents.13 Because the German sorcerer/scientist was such a well-established figure in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, physicians and healers attempted to capitalize on their German origins and educations in their advertisements (Meyer 2006,59–63).14 In fact, the term “High- German doctor” alternated in meaning between healer and quack. Images show the German doctor onstage performing his art and promoting his wares, or in his surgery surrounded by supernatural rather than medical instruments. What united those mysterious “pisse prophets”—a term coined in eighteenth-century medical debates (Porter 2000)—were the references to their foreign—that is, German—origin. From there we could draw a line to contemporary popular culture, which still uses German names and connections to add a degree of creepiness to villains, famous examples being the ambitious malevolent scientist Dr. No in the 1962 eponymous James Bond film, Christian Szell in Marathon Man (1976) (Leerssen 1994, 78), Hans Gruber in Die Hard (1988), and Ze Professor von Kriplespac in the video game Conker’s Bad Fur Day (2001). In the eighteenth century, stereotyping the Germans from an English perspective was a complex undertaking. There was no predominant image of the German, any more than there was a unified German-speaking state with secure borders, and the different characteristics of military might and metaphysical thirst for knowledge are difficult to combine in a single German type. The German’s physiognomy, physique, and clothing vary in the popular print production, and, apart from the occasional reference to sauerkraut, Germans have no distinct culinary symbol. Here, a different mechanism of stereotyping occurs: German qualities were derived from a self-image, but not in an adversarial manner. For example, German military qualities were appreciated, although, in the English nation of commerce, admired 44 S. MEYER preferably from a distance. John Bull, as the embodiment of English character, was after all a tradesman and essentially a civilian rather than a soldier, and certainly not a mercenary. And the cloudy metaphysicians and German doctors had their place in medical marketing, but not in the self-image of enlightened and rational Englishmen. From a comparative perspective, the GermansservedmoreasanalteregototheEnglishthanastheother.The process of othering, with its clear structures of contrast, works best from a distance; the closer the relationship between the self and the other, the less clear-cut the heterostereotype. As if the vision became blurred, the German image in eighteenth-century England was fuzzy and ever changing.

CONCLUSION Seeing is a historically speciﬁc cultural technique that has to be acquired physiologically, cognitively, and culturally, much like a language and its grammar. One of the core proﬁciencies is a sense of orientation, as in detecting patterns of sameness and otherness. Children’s prints and their carefully composed depiction of the world can therefore be considered to have had a key impact on the social and cultural process of othering. If seeing is believing, the validity that could be attributed to those pictures is overpowering, and the existence of the other becomes a fact. In looking at them today, we need to remind ourselves of how vital it is to deconstruct visual culture if we want to see the bigger picture.

NOTES 1. The phrase “scopic regime” was coined by the French ﬁlm theorist Christian Metz (1982). 2. See, among others, Leerssen (2000), Meyer (2003), Chew (2006), Beller and Leerssen (2007), Hoenselaars and Leerssen (2009), Neumann (2009) and O’Sullivan (2009, 2011). 3. There are, of course, notable exceptions, such as Sheila O’Connell (1999), the curator of prints in the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings. The origins of the cheap print market in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century are analyzed by Raymond (2011). 4. For gin prices and other costs of living in the eighteenth century, see Picard (2000, 294–8). For the print market, prices, and social distinction, see also O’Connell (1999, 167–80) and Donald (1996,3–9, 19–21, 27–31). 5. Thomas Bowles I ran the business at 69 St. Paul’s Churchyard from 1691 to 1721; his son Thomas Bowles II joined him in 1715. Carington Bowles I, LEARNING TO SEE: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHILDREN’S PRINTS ... 45

his nephew, took over the shop in 1763 and passed the business on to his son Henry Carington Bowles II. A branch of the family company at Mercer’s Hall in Cheapside and later at the Black Horse in Cornhill was run by John Bowles, younger brother of Thomas Bowles II (see O’Connell 1999,51–2). For an introduction to the English popular print market, see O’Connell (1999,9–41); for the more genteel section, see Clayton (1997, 3–24, 105–28). 6. The tradition of assigning the seven deadly sins according to climate theory goes as far back as the late Middle Ages (see O’Sullivan, Chapter 3 in this volume). 7. There are a number of different opinions about protonationalism and about whether the discourse of national stereotypes pre-dates the eighteenth century. The term “nation” acquired its specific and politically meaningful definition during the Enlightenment (Black 2014,47–9, 52–61; Leerssen 2006; Dann 1991). National character and stereotypes are certainly not an invention of the eighteenth century, and individual authors included national attributions in their classification systems well before 1700. These, however, did not possess the same discursive quality as the national types in the print culture of the eighteenth century. 8. An earlier version is the print “The Frenchman in Billingsgate” (1754), which also shows the Frenchman in a fistfight with an English fish wife. The background is fairly neutral; the scene simply contains the woman in the foreground holding a lobster to the man’s exposed backside. John Collett used the same topic in “The Frenchman at Market” (1770), and the motif can also be found in illustrated song sheets—for example, in “Sue Welfleet’s Bargain” (1754); cf. Meyer (2003, 219–24). 9. One can see why Thackeray’s grandfather “used to hesitate a little” before exposing young viewers to the prints’ humor. 10. Joep Leerssen (2000, 275–8) elaborates on the use of binary concepts in national stereotyping. To his oppositional pairs like north-south, strong- weak, central-peripheral, one could add male-female. 11. Earlier images do not include this requisite in the image of the Dutchman; cf. Meyer (2003, 114–35). Pipes were produced around Gouda and exported all over the world; cf. Schama (1997, 194–5). The pipe is a good example for the mechanism of pars pro toto in stereotyping. 12. It is not clear when and where this association of hands in pockets with a specific Dutch attitude first occured. By the end of the eighteenth century it was an established part of the Dutch iconography. The print “Dutch Gratitude Display’d” (1780) comments explicitly on the hands as a sign of neutrality or perhaps even indifference. The caption reads: “See Holland opress’d by his old Spanish Foe, To England with cap in hand kneels very low. The Free-hearted Britton, dispels all its care. And raises it up from the 46 S. MEYER

brink of Dispair. But when three spitefull foes does old England beset, The Dutchman refuses to pay a Just debt, With his hand in his pockets he says he’ll stand Neuter, And England his Friend may be D-d for the Future” (British Museum Catalogue 5663; cf. Meyer 2003, 124–35). 13. Joep Leerssen (1994,77–8) associates this shift in the image of Germany with the rise of Romanticism in the nineteenth century. The Gothic novel did pave the way for Frankenstein & Co., but German quacks and healers were already stock characters in eighteenth-century literature and media culture. The supernatural and metaphysical tradition was thus stronger than Leerssen seems to have thought. For more detail, see Meyer (2006, 65–6). 14. For the supernatural as a narrative theme, see O’Sullivan (1990, 125–6) and Blaicher (1992,14–19).

REFERENCES

Primary Sources Anon. 1700. The Just Judgment of God Shew’d upon Dr. John Faustus. Roxburge Collection, vol. 3, part 2, no. 280–1. British Library, http://ebba.english.ucsb. edu/ballad/30993/image. Anon. 1750? The History of Dr. John Faustus: Shewing How He Sold Himself to the Devil. ... London: Printed and Sold in Aldermary Church Yard, Bow Lane. [Bewick, T.] 1771. The History of All Nations: Giving a Brief and Entertaining Account of the Situation, Customs, Manners, Genius, Temper, Religious & Other Ceremonies, Trade, Manufactures, Arts & Sciences, Government, Policies, Laws, Cities, Rivers, Mountains, and the Most Material Natural Curiosities in Every Country Throughout the Known World. Interspersed with Upward Twenty Elegant Cuts, Representing the Habits of the People of the Different Kingdoms. 3rd ed. corrected. London: Printed for G. Robinson and J. Roberts in Pater- Noster-Row 1771. (First edition: Printed for W. Bristow, and T. Slack, 1768.) [Bewick, T.]. 1975. A Memoir of Thomas Bewick Written by Himself. Edited by I. Bain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowles, C. 1786. Carington Bowles’ New and Enlarged Catalogue of Useful and Accurate Maps, Charts and Plans. London: Carington Bowles. Bowles & Carver. 1970. Catchpenny Prints: 163 Popular Engravings from the Eighteenth Century. Originally published 1780–1810. New York: Dover Publications. Camden, W. 1870. Remains Concerning Britain. Originally published 1605. London: J. R. Smith. LEARNING TO SEE: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHILDREN’S PRINTS ... 47

Christopher, R. 1783. Catalogue of Books Consisting of Near Ten Thousand Volumes Including Sound Libraries Lately Purchased with Pamphlets, Prints, Music etc Stockton: By R. Christopher, Bookseller and Printer, 1783. Defoe, D. 1997. The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings. Edited by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens. Harmondsworth: Penguin. [Dicey, W. and C.]. 1754 [1764]. A Catalogue of Maps, Prints, Copy-books, Drawing-books, Histories, Old Ballads, Patterns, Garlands. London: Printed and sold by William and Cluer Dicey, at their warehouse, opposite the south door of Bow Church in Bow-Churchyard. Hogarth, W. 1753. The Analysis of Beauty. London: J. Reeves. Lamb, C. 1903. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. Vol. 2. Edited by E. V. Lucas. London: Methuen. Lavater, J. C. 1853. Essays on Physiognomy: Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind. 8th ed. London: W. Tegg. Moore, F. 1717. Vox Stellarum. London: Tho. Wood and Tho. Sharpe. Overbury, T. 1615. New and Choise Characters of Severall Authors. London: T. Creede for L. L’isle. [Overton, H.] 1717. A Catalogue of Maps and Prints from Off Copper-plates Which are Printed and Sold by Henry Overton at the White House, Without Newgate. London. Parker, G. 1777. Parker’s Ephemeris for the Year of Our Lord 1777. 88th impression. London: Company of Stationers. Partridge, J. 1716. Named Ephemerides: An Almanack for the Year 1716. London: J. Roberts. [Riley, G.]. 1790. A New Moral System of Geography, Containing an Account of the Different Nations Ancient and Modern: Their Situation and Climate—Their Rise and Fall—Their Customs and Manners; Including a Description of Each Country, and Their Respective Productions, by Which Commerce Has Been Established, and Society Cemented for the Good of Mankind. Adorned with the Dresses of Each Country. 2nd ed. London: Printed for G. Riley, and Sold by S. Hazard, Bath, Mess. Watson and Elder, Edenburgh [sic]. Thackeray, W. M. 1854. John Leech’s Pictures of Life and Character. Quarterly Review 191 (December): 75–86.

Secondary Sources Alpers, S. 1983. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beller, M., and J. Leerssen (eds.). 2007. Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. 48 S. MEYER

Black, J. 2014. Contesting History: Narratives of Public History. London, New York: Bloomsbury. Blaicher, G. 1992. Das Deutschlandbild in der englischen Literatur. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Bruce, V., and A. Young. 2000. In the Eye of the Beholder: The Science of Face Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chew, W. 2006. What’s in a National Stereotype? An Introduction to Imagology at the Threshold of the 21st Century. Language and Intercultural Communication 6 (3&4): 179–87. Clayton, T. 1997. The English Print 1688–1802. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Dann, O. 1991. Begriffe und Typen des Nationalen in der frühen Neuzeit. In Nationale und kulturelle Identität: Studien zur Entwicklung des kollektiven Bewußtseins in der Neuzeit, ed. B. Giesen, 56–73. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Donald, D. 1996. The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Hilton, M., and J. Shefrin (eds.). 2009. Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices. Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate. Hoenselaars, T., and J. Leerssen. 2009. The Rhetoric of National Character: Introduction. European Journal of English Studies 13(3): 251–5. Immel, A. 2005. Frederick Lock’s Scrapbook: Patterns in the Pictures and Writing in the Margin. The Lion and the Unicorn 29(1): 65–85. Jay, M. 1988. Scopic Regimes of Modernity. In Vision and Visuality, ed. H. Foster, 3–23. Huntsville: New Press. Leerssen, J. 1994. As Others See, Among Others, Us: The Anglo-German Relationship in Context. In As Others See Us: Anglo-German Perceptions, ed. H. Husemann, 69–79. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Leerssen, J. 2000. The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey. Poetics Today 21(2): 267–92. Leerssen, J. 2006. National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Metz, C. 1982. The Imaginary Signiﬁer: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Meyer, S. 2003. Die Ikonographie der Nation: Nationalstereotype in der englischen Druckgraphik des 18. Jahrhunderts. Münster: Waxmann. Meyer, S. 2006. The Germans as the Alter Ego of the English? The German Doctor in Eighteenth-Century Debate. Ethnologia Europaea 36(1): 58–69. Meyer, S., and G. Sprenger. 2011. Der Blick der Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie: Sehen als Körpertechnik zwischen Wahrnehmung und Deutung. In Disziplinen der Anthropologie, ed. S. Meyer and A. Owzar, 203–27. Münster: Waxmann. LEARNING TO SEE: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHILDREN’S PRINTS ... 49

Neumann, B. 2009. Towards a Cultural and Historical Imagology: The Rhetoric of National Character in 18th-Century Literature. European Journal of English Studies 13(3): 257–91. O’Connell, S. 1999. The Popular Print in England. London: British Museum Press. O’Sullivan, E. 1990. Friend and Foe: The Image of Germany and the Germans in British Children’s Fiction from 1870 to the Present. Tübingen: Narr. O’Sullivan, E. 2009. S Is for Spaniard: The Representation of Foreign Nations in ABCs and Picturebooks. European Journal of English Studies 13(3): 333–49. O’Sullivan, E. 2011. Imagology Meets Children’s Literature. International Research in Children’s Literature 4(1): 1–14. Picard, L. 2000. Dr. Johnson’s London: Life in London 1740–1770. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Porter, R. 2000. Quacks: Fakers & Charlatans in English Medicine. Stroud: Tempus. Raymond, J. (ed.). 2011. The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture. Vol. 1: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Samuelian, K. F. 2010. Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy in Print, 1780–1821. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schama, S. 1997. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. London: Vintage. Schivelbusch, W. 1986. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Stoker, D. 2014. Another Look at the Dicey-Marshall Publications: 1736–1806. The Library 15(2): 111–57. Thompson, P. 1980. Margaret Thatcher: A New Illusion. Perception 9(4): 483–4. Wulf, C. 1997. Das Auge. In Vom Menschen: Handbuch historische Anthropologie, ed. C. Wulf, 446–58. Weinheim, Basel: Beltz. Zacharasiewicz, W. 1977. Die Klimatheorie in der englischen Literatur von der Mitte des 16. bis zum frühen 18. Jahrhundert. Vienna: Braumüller.

Silke Meyer studied folklore, cultural anthropology, art history and English literature at the universities of Tübingen, Germany; Shefﬁeld, UK; and Münster, Germany. In her PhD, published as Die Ikonographie der Nation. Nationalstereotype in der englischen Druckgraphik des 18. Jahrhunderts (2003), she analyzed the representation of nations in eighteenth-century popular prints. Since 2010 she has been Associate Professor in the Department of History and European Ethnology at Innsbruck University, Austria, where she specializes in economic anthropology, especially the study of credit and debts, narratology, visual studies, and processes and functions of stereotyping. CHAPTER 3

Picturing the World for Children: Early Nineteenth-Century Images of Foreign Nations

Emer O’Sullivan

In The Little Traveller, or, A Sketch of the Various Nations of the World (Steerwell ca. 1830), young James Steerwell, just back from his world travels, treats his cousins to a pleasant sort of geography lesson. He uses his own pictures for the exercise, which supposedly vouch for the authenticity of his show-and-tell (Fig. 3.1). The iconography—the ship in the top right corner of the image, James’s naval uniform with Napoleonic bicorne, tailcoat, and sword, and the social setting of his presentation—situate the boy’s trip in the contexts of the civilian Grand Tour, of military campaigns, and of world-conquering expeditions (his surname Steerwell is, of course, a telling one). Furthermore, the patent excitement and curiosity of his cousins reﬂect the contemporary interest in geography and offer a behavioral model for the book’s young readers.1 By showing pictures of the “various nations of the world,” James is also mirroring a move in education at that time toward using images in place of objects for teaching. The pictures themselves do not emulate a child’s drawings;

E. O’Sullivan (*) Leuphana University Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany

© The Author(s) 2017 51 E. O’Sullivan, A. Immel (eds.), Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8_3 52 E. O’SULLIVAN

Fig. 3.1 Illustration from J. Steerwell, The Little Traveller, or, A Sketch of the Various Nations of the World (London: printed and sold by Dean and Munday, Threadneedle-Street, ca. 1830). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library therefore, the unlikely, comic ﬁction of young James’s tour does not extend to them. Instead, the fourteen hand-colored, half-page images of adult inhabitants of countries such as Lapland, Holland, China, Persia, and the Sandwich Islands, each accompanied by a page or so of text, are strikingly similar to others we ﬁnd for children in the early nineteenth century.2 This chapter addresses these images, their genesis, and the media in which they appear. I begin with a brief survey of early nineteenth-century recreational and educational publications for children that presented foreign countries, and then discuss a new educational aid of the 1830s: a roll of prints published by William Darton and Son for display in the so-called PICTURING THE WORLD FOR CHILDREN: EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY ... 53

Rudiment Box. I look at how this device was used to teach cultural geography, paying special attention to two prints: “Climates of the Earth” and “Costumes of Nations, for Infant Schools.” With the first print, my focus is on the theory that informed the division of the world into zones and the assignment of characteristics to their inhabitants, as well as the implicit instruction pupils received about their own place in the world. Next, I look at the second print as a whole, considering which nations are featured and what factors might have influenced their selection. The underlying principle of contrast is probed as I examine how the representatives of these nations are depicted, paying special attention to the traditions of their portrayals. My focus is on the material and not on its reception, about which we can only speculate. Nor can we know whether teachers told their pupils that members of other nations were exactly like the figures they saw in the pictures, or whether the children actually believed them to be so. The chapter concludes with two late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fictional accounts of parents who discuss foreign nations with their children in a way that challenges the ethnotypical images presented in prints such as “Costumes of Nations for Infant Schools.”3 My approach is based on the academic discipline of imagology, or image studies, which provides the theoretical foundation for analyzing such representations—even though it has not, as yet, paid much attention to material images or to visual representations. Ton Hoenselaars and Joep Leerssen define imagology as

based on, but not limited to, the inventory and typology of how nations are typiﬁed, represented, and/or caricatured in a given tradition or corpus of cultural articulations. On the basis of the analysis of texts or cultural arte- facts, it raises questions about the mechanism of national/ethnic ‘othering’ and its underlying self-images (2009, 251)

Imagology investigates how an image and its historical context are expressed in texts rather than engaging with its purported reference to empirical reality. Inquiring into the origin and tradition of ethnotypes, it observes conventions of discourse such as intertextuality, asking where the images come from and why speciﬁc ones are implemented (for what purpose) at any given point in time. In other words, it investigates “the complex links between literary discourse on the one hand and national identity-constructs on the other” (Leerssen 2000,270). 54 E. O’SULLIVAN

THE PORTRAYAL OF FOREIGN NATIONS FOR CHILDREN Images of foreign cultures do not originate as often in vernacular discourses as in literary and artistic ones. Franz Karl Stanzel (1998) identifies encyclopedias, ethnographies, and the categorizations of persons according to sex, age, class, and nationality in the normative poetics of European Neoclassicism and representational schemes as sources of verbal and visual stereotypes of foreign national characters. To illustrate this concept, he examines a “Tableau of Peoples” from the early eighteenth century, to which I return later. As will become apparent, intertextuality, the adhesion to established visual and textual forms, is a significant factor in the tradition of national images. Systematic representations of foreigners in books for children started to occur around the late eighteenth century. Friedrich Justin Bertuch’s twelve-volume Bilderbuch für Kinder (Picturebook for Children, 1792– 1830), the most celebrated comprehensive pictorial encyclopedia for children, contains short articles on zoology, geography, and anthropology. The section entitled “Menschen und Trachten” (People and Costumes) shows how clothing was the primary means to identify people from other countries in the numerous late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century illustrated books about costumes, customs, and manners.4 Books describing “people of all nations” contributed to an emerging ethnology “that linked elements of classification such as race, colour, and origin to temperament, character, and types” (David 2005, 53), and reflected the impulse toward classification in late eighteenth-century European thought. The cultural perspective of these geography textbooks designed both to instruct and to amuse is generally Eurocentric, or specifically Anglocentric; other peoples are often compared with Europeans or the English in terms of their inferiority. For example, in the introduction to Scenes in Europe, for the Amusement and Instruction of Little Tarry-at- Home Travellers (Taylor 1818), the author declares that readers will dis- cover their good fortune to have been born English without the incon- venience of having to leave their own country. Prints started to play an increasingly important role in educational contexts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as documented in Jill Shefrin’s meticulous account of material produced by the “industry in printed teaching aids” (2009, 3). When Samuel Wilderspin, one of the driving forces behind infant school education of the 1820s, introduced pictures into his classroom and convinced the PICTURING THE WORLD FOR CHILDREN: EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY ... 55 publisher William Darton Jr. to start issuing “lessons” or educational prints for infant schools (102), education took what we would today call a “pictorial turn.”5

LEARNING GEOGRAPHY WITH THE RUDIMENT BOX One of the new educational aids Darton issued between 1830 and 1834 was the Rudiment Box, also known as the Drawing Room Mine, an “elaborate novelty” that offered “an entire curriculum in a box, largely through pictures” (Shefrin 2009, 106). Intended for use by a teacher with a large class of pupils or in a private nursery, the painted wooden box measured approximately 60 cm × 60 cm × 25 cm, with hinged, glass- paneled doors front and back, and contained ﬁfty-three hand-colored prints pasted onto rolled-up linen strips. When the teacher turned a crank “rather like an old gramophone handle” (Lawrence Darton quoted in Coghlan and O’Connor 2009, 93), a roll of prints passed behind each window. Some of the prints on the rolls date from the early 1820s (ibid.); others were issued simultaneously with the box, and many were advertised elsewhere for separate sale. In 1834 the Liberty Infant School in Dublin, where the box was possibly ﬁrst implemented, issued a thirty-two-page pamphlet, Introductory Lectures to the Subjects in the Rudiment Box, for teachers to use with the prints.6 The purpose and use of the box are explained, and scripts are provided for lessons on “Geography,” “Agriculture,”“Natural History,”“Manufactures,”“Trades,”“Figures,” “Astronomy,”“Geometry,”“Grammar,” and “Miscellaneous” (Anon. 1834, 32). The script for geography, the subject in which the concept of “foreign nations” is usually introduced, underscores what Valerie Coghlan and Geraldine O’Connor (2009, 95) identify as the “desire to engage pupils and to enliven the educational experience” evidenced by the rolls:

CHILDREN, As you all seem to think that you had rather be industrious, useful characters, than idle and vicious, I hope you will pay attention to a little instruction. We will choose Geography for our subject. ... Kingdoms, or countries, are often inhabited by people of very different characters; some are very sober and industrious, and spend their time in cultivating their land, taking care to enrich it with good manure, and clear it of great stones and weeds; which makes it produce such good crops, that 56 E. O’SULLIVAN

sometimes they have more than they want, and can spare some to sell; and then with the money they receive for it, they can buy useful materials of different kinds, which they cannot get in their own country without sending ships to bring them. This is called importing goods, and sending out of the country is called exporting; the whole is called merchandise, and the ships that convey the goods are called merchant- ships. (Anon. 1834,7)

The end of the last sentence seems to cue the teacher to display the print “A Merchant Ship” in the Rudiment Box’s window. After more instruction, the lecture concludes:

I do not want to tire your attention by listening too long, and will now stop and give you some explanations on the map. You may ask any questions you please. You may expect to be questioned on all the subjects which you are taught, sometimes in turns by name; and your teachers will be able to judge by your answers whether you have paid proper attention: you may always inquire when you do not understand any thing. (ibid.)

After this introduction, which is actually more about agriculture and trade than about geography, the children’s attention would presumably have been drawn to the nine colored maps, most of them proclaimed as from the “Best” or most “Recent Authorities.” The ﬁrst print, “Climates of the Earth,” shows “The Western Hemisphere or New World” and “The Eastern Hemisphere or Old World,” andisfollowedbymapsofthe then ﬁve continents (Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, and South America) and the countries most familiar to the audience of the Rudiment Box: England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.7 Each map includes written information, and many also offer instructions for teaching.8 As the lecture declared industriousness and usefulness—rather than idleness and viciousness—to be the pupils’ putative goals, the link between these virtues and their nation is already established. The lectures themselves do not specify which peoples were “very sober and industrious,” but the geography prints supply that information. The most comprehensive account of the “nature” of the earth’s different peoples appears on the print “Climates of the Earth” (Fig. 3.2), where texts about the different climate zones, countries, and characteristics of the inhabitants are arranged around the images of the hemispheres. The countries are divided PICTURING THE WORLD FOR CHILDREN: EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY ... 57

Fig. 3.2 “Climates of the Earth” from the Rudiment Box (1834?). Reproduced with the permission of the Church of Ireland College of Education archives into four groups: the thinly inhabited “Artic Circle” (Greenland, Iceland, Siberia, etc.); the “Northern temperate countries” (most European countries, Japan, the northern states of America, etc); the “Hot Countries ...near the Equinoctical line” (the “greatest part of Africa- Arabia, India, part of China,” the South American countries, etc.); and the “Southern countries,” which are “more or less temperate like the North” (the “Cape of Good Hope in Africa, part of New Holland or Australia ..., the South Sea Islands,” etc.). The assignment of physical, spiritual, and intellectual dispositions according to the environment follows contemporary climate theory, a pseudoscience that emerged in the sixteenth century and posited a division of the known world into three zones (hot, cold, and temperate), where the environmental conditions determined the nature of the inhabitants. People living in severe cold or heat were classiﬁed as extreme and opposed 58 E. O’SULLIVAN

(icy and stiff versus hot-tempered), whereas the fortunate inhabitants of the temperate zone were considered intelligent and balanced. The geographical location of the temperate zone varied according to the nationality of a given author, as the climatological explanation of cultural difference had the tendency to “autocentrically project domestic and contemporary conditions and to ethnocentrically see one’s own position as a median standard” (Beller 2007, 302).9 “Climates of the Earth” presents climate theory to children, who can glean from it how the people in the different zones are characterized—that is, which ones are “very sober and industrious” and which are not. The inhabitants of the northern temperate countries are described in the most flattering terms for possessing seven virtues: “Industry, ingenuity, enterprise, learning, science, religious feeling, cleanliness.” The rest of the world’s inhabitants are characterized in terms of their display or lack of these virtues according to the process of ethnic stereotyping by which any ingroup maintains a favorable self-image by defensively projecting traits and features regarded as undesirable onto others. To cite the photographic metaphor used by Clemens Ruthner, “the negative of the Other is used to develop one’s own positive” (2012, 147). According to “Climates,” the inhabitants of the Arctic Circle “are inoffensive, but rude, ignorant, and dirty, clothed with the skins of furred beasts, and of seals, upon the flesh and fat of which they subsist,” thereby clearly providing the antithesis of the virtues of “learning” and “cleanliness.” In some of the hot countries, “Indolence, luxurious habits, love of show and rich dress, prevail ...idolatry and ignorance are general,” traits that preclude industry, learning, and religious feeling. However, China and Arabia are noted as exceptions, sounding a note of differentiation: “in many of the eastern countries the arts and sciences are cultivated, and from thence were first brought to Europe.” The people from the southern countries illustrate the opposite of cleanliness, industry, and enterprise. They “wear little clothing; they are more or less in a savage state, except where mixed with colonies from Europe. In New Holland, or Australia, they are very brutish and dirty, living upon the natural productions, as they do not cultivate the soil” (emphasis added). As can be seen clearly from this example, school geography texts often reflect contemporary values and incorporate prevailing norms as they impart a view of the world. They are therefore part of not only the geographical and educational arena but also, as Avril Maddrell reminds us, “the wider political and social discourses of the time” (1998, 81). PICTURING THE WORLD FOR CHILDREN: EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY ... 59

Climate zone theory racialized people in terms of their environment, thus facilitating their classiﬁcation and justifying colonial conquests (cf. 94). And empire is the not so hidden subtext of “Climates of the Earth” when the pupils are told about the savage, brutish, and primitive state of the inhabitants of the southern regions, who had yet to beneﬁt from contact with northern, “temperate” Europeans.

COSTUMES OF NATIONS FOR INFANT SCHOOLS The Rudiment Box presents images of hemispheres, continents, and countries in the geography lesson, but not of their inhabitants. However, we do find some people represented in two prints in a small section on “mankind” between “Geography” and “Natural History.” The first of these, “Rustic Scenes,” has twelve illustrations of men and women involved in various agricultural activities (reaping, milking, etc.). The other, “Costumes of Nations,” has twelve images, each representing a “nation” in the sense of a “cultural aggregate” (Leerssen 2007, 378)— that is, the population of a country or a large-scale ethnic group.10 Arranged in three rows of four images each, they are: Arabians, Highlanders, Turks, Spaniards, Italians, Dutch, Portuguese, English, Swiss, Chinese, Laplanders, and French (see Fig. 3.3). There is no explanatory text beyond the caption below each figure. The pictures follow a pattern. A costumed couple represents each nation, usually an adult male and female; the scenes for the English and the Laplanders are the only ones with children. The costumes are traditional, often iconic (a kilt on the Highlander, a turban on the Arabian), and in many cases anachronistic; the only couples sporting contemporary fashion are the English and the French. Some participate in activities associated with their countries: bagpipe playing (Scotland), cheese making (Switzerland), or smoking a hookah (Turkey). Most couples are engaged in some form of recreation; the only working scene is that of the Swiss, although work- or trade- related elements are visible in a few other images, such as the Scottish spinning wheel, the Dutch barrel, and the exotic Arabian camel (the only animal depicted). The background elements are minimal: flora (palm tree in Arabia and China), topography (icy mountains in Lapland), or architecture (Italy, England). If we assume that the number of pictures was dictated by considera- tions of space and layout, we have to ask why these particular twelve national groups were chosen. The viewer is offered a mixture of the 60 E. O’SULLIVAN

Fig. 3.3 “Costumes of Nations, for Infant Schools” from the Rudiment Box (1834?). Reproduced with the permission of the Church of Ireland College of Education archives

familiar (English), the mildly exotic (continental Europeans), and the very exotic (Arabians, Turks, Chinese, and Laplanders). All but two of the nations belong to the northern temperate zone according to the “Climates” print, and those two represent the extremes: the Arabians from the hot, southern zone and the Laplanders from the cold, Arctic one. The Europeans shown also happen to represent countries on the itinerary of the Grand Tour undertaken by upper-class young British men in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to expose them to the cultural legacy of classical antiquity and to European polite society. The activities on display correspond to what they could expect to see and learn: music and classical architecture in Italy, dancing in France, andsoon. PICTURING THE WORLD FOR CHILDREN: EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY ... 61

Topical relevance could play a role in selection, as in the case of the Sandwich Islands in The Little Traveller (Steerwell ca. 1830), where they are considered among just fourteen nations. However, there are also countries that almost always appear, regardless of how small the number of featured nations. Lapland is one of these: indeed, Laps seem to populate children’s educational and recreational material in inverse proportion to the size of their population.11 Their defining characteristic, seemingly a fascinosum for Europeans from temperate climes, is their survival against almost inconceivably adverse climactic conditions. Their hardiness may also have served as a virtuous contrast to the luxurious lifestyle of Europeans. In fact, contrast is another important criterion for a nation’s selection. The idea of difference rather than similarity is the principle of these representations, in the “presupposition that a nation is most itself in those aspects wherein it is most unlike the others,” which basically restricts identity “to particularism and exoticism” (Leerssen 2003). Seemingly unique characteristics are used as a type of visual shorthand—camel for the Arabians, hookah for the Turks, tea drinking for the Chinese. The principle of contrast works on the level of comparison between the autostereotype of the readers’ or viewers’ culture and the presented heteroimage. English sensibilities at this time were fascinated and repelled by the reputedly sybaritic life of Oriental luxury: the bearded Turkish pasha in loose garb reclining on cushions and smoking his hookah looks unlikely to subscribe to the seven virtues of the northerners. But contrast also works in prints on the level of pairs of images; Arabs and Laplanders, for instance, Turks and Highlanders, and the Spanish and the Dutch are easily identified as opposites. To examine how the principle of contrast works here, I look more closely at this final pair and then at the English and French couples. With them, as with all different types, the sources of the representations owe more to traditions of portrayal than to actual observation.

CONTRASTING PAIRS OF IMAGES The iconic image of the Spanish male goes back at least as far as to the representational schemes identified by Franz Karl Stanzel as sources of verbal and visual stereotypes of foreign national characters (Stanzel 1998). One representational scheme Stanzel discusses is a “Völkertafel” (tableau of nationalities) called Kurze Beschreibung der in Europa Befintlichen Völckern und Ihren Aigenschafften (Short Description of the Peoples in Europe and Their Characteristics), an oil painting created 62 E. O’SULLIVAN in Styria around 1725. It shows ten costumed male ethnotypes, each characterized by a tabulation of his traits in seventeen categories. Pride, or superbia,thespecific habitus attributed to the Spaniard, is consistent with a late medieval tradition that assigned the seven deadly sins to specific people according to climate theory (Stanzel 1999,20).Unlike the Frenchman, the German, and the Englishman depicted in the tableau, the Spanish nobleman is clothed anachronistically with volumi- nous cape, sword, and plumed hat (Grieshofer 1999,54).Hissixteenth- century costume dates from the pinnacle of Spanish power and is a defining marker in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representations. Thus the stereotype of the Spaniard is linked not just with national history but also with class, as his clothing clearly identifies his elevated social rank. Silke Meyer goes so far as to call the Spaniard “the eternal nobleman” (2003,309).12 The Rudiment Box’s “Costumes of Nations” shows one such Spaniard, dressed in knee-length, tapered breeches, short cape, and extravagantly plumed hat, seemingly preening in front of his modestly dressed lady. In contrast to this couple, the corpulent Dutchman is anything but noble. He stands with legs apart and feet planted firmly on the ground, giving him the air of an uncultivated, stolid farmer and underscoring his ungainliness in comparison with the Spaniard, who, with his weight mainly on one leg, has the light-footed air of a dancer. Traditionally represented as of low, rural origins, the Dutch are nonetheless successful tradespeople. The figures standing by a barrel on the quayside with a ship in the background indicate the connection with trade and export. Plainly dressed as befits good Calvinists, the man wears a broad-brimmed hat and traditional baggy breeches, and the woman keeps the hem of her dress shorter than that of the other women in the print. The Dutch disinterest in fashion, as opposed to Spanish vanity, is a qualifying feature mentioned in popular geography texts such as A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies (1751?). Running to at least fifteen editions before the end of the eighteenth century, it characterizes the Dutch as “not polite People, but clean and frugal, and very labourious; ready to undertake any thing for Gain, are extremely nice in their Houses and Streets, though careless in Dress” (136). Pipe smoking was another habit traditionally associated with the Dutch, an image made popular in England by genre scenes in the mass-produced Dutch paintings from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries (Meyer 2003, 145). Pictures of a smoking Dutchman propped against a barrel on the quayside feature in PICTURING THE WORLD FOR CHILDREN: EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY ... 63

Pug’s Tour through Europe (Anon. 1824,17)andThe Little Traveller (Steerwell ca. 1830, 13). (For further discussion of the smoking Dutchman, see Silke Meyer’s chapter in this volume.) Of all the nationalities depicted in “Costumes of Nations,” the English and the French seem to resemble each other most closely; but there are significant differences, particularly in terms of how readers are invited to position themselves in relation to the figures. Both couples are dressed in the contemporary upper-class Regency fashion, the men in the Beau Brummell style with tall hat, cravat, dark-blue dress coat, and full-length trousers, the ladies in high-waisted Empire dresses. But a subtle difference points to a long tradition of Anglo-French contrasting stereotypes. The English couple is shown out of doors with the lady in walking attire—a floor-length white gown with a high neckline, Spencer jacket, and bonnet with a wide semicircular brim. The French couple, on the other hand, is portrayed indoors. The lady’s evening gown, with its wide neckline, short, puffed sleeves, and higher hemline, is more revealing, suggesting she is more frivolous than the modestly dressed Englishwoman. The lean Frenchman making an exaggerated bow is an elegant but effeminate figure who compares unfavorably with the “natural” manner of the upright Englishman. This popular English autostereotype has a long tradition, as does the utilization of the traditional contrast with the heterostereotype of its century-old rival France, whose aristocratic traditions were taken to represent everything the English middle and upper middle classes rejected. The foil of French aristocratic corruption, linked iconographically to foppery and luxury, shows English manliness, moderation, and industry to better advantage. A further point of difference between the English and French groups is the presence of the child in the English picture. The only other child shown is a Laplander. However, these two child images may have served different functions. In many children’s books, young viewers and readers are invited to imagine what it might be like to be a Lap, exposed to the rudest of conditions; the Lap child in this particular print could offer a temporary and exciting “armchair traveling” experience. The invitation to identify with the English child is, I believe, of a different nature. It could be read as encouragement to the young viewers to align themselves with him and hence with the “right” nationality, thus offering the key to becoming the “industrious, useful characters” invoked at the beginning of the geography lecture. This 64 E. O’SULLIVAN reading is, of course, pure speculation, as there is no documentation of how these specific images on the Darton rolls might have been presented or of how children might have responded to them. The print is, unfortunately, not mentioned in the Introductory Lectures (Anon. 1834). So we are left with a print that presents fixed images; but whether children were encouraged in their lessons to take them at face value or whether they were used for diversion, or—perhaps most likely—a mixture of both, we will never know.

CONCLUSION:CONTESTING THE IMAGES In the early nineteenth century, books and materials of all kinds for British children mined the quarry of images of foreign nations in circulation, many of which originated centuries earlier. The images in “Costumes of Nations for Infant Schools” and the information about nations in “Climates of the Earth” are presented from a firmly Eurocentric, Anglocentric view, and nothing in the prints contests this perspective. However, there were other publications for children that called into question this voyeuristic exhibition of foreignness and difference, and instead invited young readers to take a more nuanced view, propagating Enlightenment ideas of the recognition and tolerance of different cultural perspectives. This ethos informs The Little Enquirer: or, Instructive Conversations for Children from Five to Six Years of Age (Anon. 1830), a series of fictional educational conversations that take place between a mother and small daughter about subjects such as basic astrology, countries, and continents of the world. When the girl sees a picture of a “Dutch fish woman ...in her Sunday dress,” which shows the woman wearing a poke bonnet with a very large projecting rim on the front side, she voices her amused amazement: “What a smart dress for a fishwoman! and what a funny shaped bonnet!” (72).13 This comment elicits a sharpish reply from her mother: “Idaresayif she were to see you in your little bonnet, she would think it just as funny as youdoher’s.” She then proceeds a little less harshly to offer a lesson in tolerance: “Almost all countries have each a different style of dress; that is, the inhabitants of one country generally dress differently from those of another, and some of them appear very singular to a person who sees them for the first time.” This guideline, as the mother has already made clear, also applies to the habits and costumes of English children from a foreign perspective. PICTURING THE WORLD FOR CHILDREN: EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY ... 65

Advice to children to observe themselves as others see them is the exception, not the rule, in children’s literature at this time, but we ﬁnd one such instruction artfully executed in “Travellers’ Wonders” by John Aikin and Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1792). When asked by his children to tell them of his adventures, a sea captain describes a remarkable people whose way of life, diet, habits, and clothing seem most strange:

Some of them ate ﬁsh that had been hung up in smoke till they were quite dry and hard; ...the richer had a whiter kind of cake, which they were fond of daubing over with a greasy matter that was the product of a large animal among them. ... The strangest custom that I believe prevails in any nation I found here, which was, that some take a mighty pleasure in ﬁlling their mouths full of stinking smoke; and others, in thrusting a nasty powder up their nostrils. ... One thing surprised me much, which was, that they bring up in their houses an animal of the tiger kind, with formidable teeth and claws, which, notwithstanding its natural ferocity, is played with and car- essed by the most timid and delicate of their women. (25, 27, 30)

When one child ﬁnally realizes that the exotic country is actually Britain, the father explains the reason behind the amusing guessing game: “I meant to show you, that a foreigner might easily represent everything as equally strange and wonderful among us, as we could do with respect to his country” (31). Lynne Vallone calls this way of enlarging a child’s ability, through narrative, to imagine other cultural perspectives, a “late eighteenth-century ‘voyage’ of ethical discovery” (2009, 189). Voyages of ethical discovery take place in texts that do not connote difference as exclusively exotic, and when empathy and sympathetic curiosity inform the approach rather than voyeurism and exoticization. They emphasize the sameness of difference by showing that the experience of being different is ultimately the same for everyone. The perspective of the Darton rolls examined here, on the other hand, is more representative of the majority of late eighteenth-century children’s texts, educational or entertaining. They offer a ﬁrm, secure version of the world and of the various peoples’ places in it, in keeping with values and norms prevalent in contemporary political, social, and educational discourses. Their Anglocentrism ensures that difference is seen as a quality attributed to others and never to oneself, and serves to educate children about the right virtues and how they are distributed across the globe. The strategy of portraying cultural 66 E. O’SULLIVAN identities as particular and exotic emphasizes difference and supports its voyeuristic exhibition for educational and entertainment purposes.

NOTES 1. The Royal Geographical Society of London was founded in 1830 as an institu- tion to promote and diffuse the advancement of geographical knowledge. Similar societies had already been founded on the European continent; the Société de Géographie was founded in Paris in 1821, and the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde in Berlin in 1828 (see Baigent 2014). 2. The relatively small Sandwich Islands (the name given to the Hawaiian Islands by James Cook in 1778) frequently featured in compendia of nations for children in the 1820s, which can be partly explained by the visit of King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamamalu to England in May 1824 to meet King George IV. They received very favorable press coverage as a stylish royal couple, but the trip came to a tragic end when they died of measles. The positive contemporary attitude toward them and their country is reflected in the The Little Traveller. 3. Joep Leerssen defines “ethnotypes” as stereotypes applied to groups that are primarily perceived and characterized by their ethnicity. See, for example, Leerssen (2012, 6). 4. An example is Alfred Mills’s miniature ABC book People of All Nations (1801) with engraved illustrations of single male representatives of nations, usually holding a work implement or a weapon, and accompanied by a brief text. The book continues after the “Zealander” with thirty-seven more representatives of “nations” in random alphabetical order. The people featured under O are, surprisingly, the “Orang-Outans”. 5. Wilderspin was not the first to advocate the benefit of pictures. In the 1790s, Maria Edgeworth and her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, declared in Practical Education that “prints will be entertaining to children at a very early age; it would be endless to enumerate the uses that may be made of them; they teach accuracy of sight, they engage the attention, and employ the imagination” (1798, 11). 6. The Rudiment Box was “perhaps even pioneered” at the Liberty Infant School, Cole Alley, Meath Street, Dublin (Coghlan and O’Connor 2009,95).Shefrintellsusthatan1838reportonaninfantschoolin Stoke Newington mentions “a young quakeress [sic]whothoroughly understands the practice, which she learnt at an infant school in Dublin” (2009, 109). One of the only two known existing copies of the Darton rolls with fifty-three prints (albeit without a box) is in the archive of the Kildare Place Society in Dublin, housed in the Church of Ireland College of Education. PICTURING THE WORLD FOR CHILDREN: EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY ... 67

7. Although on the Dublin copy of the Darton rolls the print with the map of Ireland is in the correct position, so that the information surrounding it can be read, the map itself in the center is printed upside down, making it particularly challenging for pupils to trace the rivers and identify natural beauties as instructed. 8. The text on the map of Europe recommends: “It should be an occasional exercise of the children when examined for instruction, to travel around the Coast of Europe, from the Black Sea to the Baltic; and each take the Rivers of note in succession, mention where they take their rise, what countries they pass through, what cities and towns are built upon them, and mention some historical, biographical, architectural, and natural objects of interest worthy of notice in each place” (The Rudiment Box 1834?). 9. See Zacharasiewicz (2010,73–74) for an account of how the eighteenth- century English poet Richard Blackmore accords the ideal position to England, while French advocates of the climate theory claim that France commands a privileged position. 10. Shefrin (2009, 244) dates the sheet to 1830–1836, but as it is present on the roll for the Rudiment Box issued between 1830 and 1834 (cf. 107), it cannot have been issued after 1834. 11. In ABC books featuring nations, L is nearly always for Lapland. The text of one of numerous examples is “L a Laplander: there Winter long reigns, /There men walk in snow-shoes o’er icy-bound plains” (Anon. [1863], n.p.). Matthew Grenby (2001) underscores the intertextual nature of the dress (spiral cap, pointed shoes) and habits in his notes to the Laplanders in The Costume, Manners, and Peculiarities, of Different Inhabitants of the Globe (1821), where he suggests they were based on Lapland Sketches,another book from the Harris’s Cabinet of Amusement and Instruction series, which in turn was probably inspired by an exhibition of Laplanders and their accou- trements which was held in London in the early 1820s. 12. See Meyer (2003, 298–332) for an extensive discussion of the iconography of the Spaniard in eighteenth-century England. 13. The illustration is reproduced at Lilly Library Publications Online: http:// www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/etexts/darton/images/gt85-l77-1830_00001. shtml (accessed December 2, 2014).

REFERENCES

Primary Sources Aikin, J., and A. Barbauld. 1792. Travellers’ Wonders. In Evenings at Home; or The Juvenile Budget Opened, J. Aikin and A. Barbauld, ed. vol. 1, pp. 22–32. London: J. Johnson. 68 E. O’SULLIVAN

A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies, or, A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses. 1751? London: Printed for J. Hodges, on the Bridge; J. Newbery, in St. Paul’s-Church Yard; and B. Collins, in Salisbury. Anon. 1821. The Costume, Manners, and Peculiarities, of Different Inhabitants of the Globe, Calculated to Instruct and Amuse the Little Folks of All Countries. London: John Harris. Anon. 1824. Pug’s Tour through Europe; or The Travell’d Monkey; Containing His Wonderful Adventure in the Principal Capitals of the Greatest Empires, Kingdoms and States. Written by Himself. London: John Harris. Anon. 1830. The Little Enquirer: or, Instructive Conversations for Children from Five to Six Years of Age. London: Harvey & Darton. Anon. 1834. Introductory Lectures to the Subjects in the Rudiment-box at the Liberty Infant-School: Cole Alley, Meath-Street, Dublin. London: William Darton. Anon. Ca. 1847–1854. A Peep at the World, and a Picture of Some of Its Inhabitants. London: Thomas Dean & Co. Anon. [1863]. The Alphabet of Nations ABC. London: Dean & Son. Bertuch, F. J. J. 1792–1830. Bilderbuch für Kinder. 12 vols. Weimar: Verlag des Industrie-Comptoirs. Available online at http://diglit.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ diglit/bertuch1790ga (accessed December 2, 2014). Edgeworth, M., and R. L. Edgeworth. 1798. Practical Education. Vol. 1. London: J. Johnson. Available online at https://archive.org/details/practicaleduca ti00edge (accessed December 2, 2014). Mills, Alfred. 1801. People of All Nations: A Useful Toy, for Girl or Boy. London: Darton and Harvey, Gracechurch-Street. Steerwell, J. Ca. 1830. The Little Traveller, or, A Sketch of the Various Nations of the World. Representing the Costumes, and Describing the Manners and Peculiarities of the Inhabitants. Embellished with Fifteen Beautifully Coloured Engravings. London: Printed and sold by Dean and Munday, Threadneedle-Street. Taylor, I. 1818. Scenes in Europe, for the Amusement and Instruction of Little Tarry-at-home Travellers. London: J. Harris. The Rudiment Box. 1834? London: William Darton and Son.

Secondary Sources Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Baigent, E. 2014. Founders of the Royal Geographical Society of London (act. 1828–1830). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ theme/95334 (accessed July 13, 2014). PICTURING THE WORLD FOR CHILDREN: EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY ... 69

Beller, M. 2007. Climate. In Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey, ed. M. Beller and J. Leerssen, 298–304. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Beller, M., and J. Leerssen (eds.). 2007. Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Coghlan, V., and G. O’Connor. 2009. The Kildare Place Society: An Inﬂuential Force in 19th Century Irish Education. In Acts of Reading: Teachers, Text and Childhood, ed. M. Styles and E. Arizpe, 87–96. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. David, L. 2005. Children’s Books Published by William Darton and His Sons: A Catalogue of an Exhibition at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, April– June, 1992. With a Historical Calendar by Lawrence Darton. http://www. indiana.edu/~liblilly/etexts/darton/ (accessed December 2, 2014). Dukić, D. 2012. The Syndrome of Aboutness as Caring About: Imagology vs. Thematology. In Imagology Today: Achievements, Challenges, Perspectives/ Imagologie heute: Ergebnisse, Herausforderungen, Perspektiven, ed. D. Dukić, 115–26. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag. Dyserinck, H. 1966. Zum Problem der “images” und “mirages” und ihrer Untersuchung im Rahmen der vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft. arcadia 1: 107–20. Grenby, M. O. 2001. Anon.: The Costume, Manners, and Peculiarities, of Different Inhabitants of the Globe. The Hockliffe Project. http://hockliffe. dmu.ac.uk/items/0569B.html (accessed December 2 2014). Grieshofer, F. 1999. Die Tracht der Kleidung: Bemerkungen zur Darstellung der europäischen Nationen auf der “Völkertafel.” In Europäischer Völkerspiegel: Imagologisch-ethnographische Studien zu den Völkertafeln des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. F. K. Stanzel, 45–60. Heidelberg: C. Winter. Hoenselaars, T., and J. Leerssen. 2009. The Rhetoric of National Character: Introduction. European Journal of English Studies 13(3): 251–55. Leerssen, J. 2000. The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey. Poetics Today 21(2): 267–92. Leerssen, J. 2003. National Identity and National Stereotype. Images. http:// www.imagologica.eu/leerssen (accessed December 2, 2014). Leerssen, J. 2007. Nation, Ethnie, People. In Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey, ed. M. Beller and J. Leerssen, 377–81. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Leerssen, J. 2012. Ethnotypen sind Akteure: Zur Poetik und Rhetorik des Vorurteils. In Wir und die Anderen: Stereotypen in der Schweiz, ed. B. Engler, 5–20. Fribourg: Academic Press Fribourg. Maddrell, A. M. C. 1998. Discourses of Race and Gender and the Comparative Method in Geography School Texts 1830–1918. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 16(1): 81–103. 70 E. O’SULLIVAN

Meyer, S. 2003. Die Ikonographie der Nation: Nationalstereotype in der englischen Druckgraphik des 18. Jahrhunderts. Münster: Waxmann. Neumann, B. 2009. Towards a Cultural and Historical Imagology: The Rhetoric of National Character in 18th-Century British Literature. European Journal of English Studies 13(3): 275–91. O’Sullivan,E.2009.SIsforSpaniard:The Representation of Foreign Nations in ABCs and Picturebooks. European Journal of English Studies 13(3): 333–49. Ruthner, C. 2012. Between Aachen and America: Bhabha, Kürnberger and the Ambivalence of Imagology. In Imagology Today: Achievements, Challenges, Perspectives/Imagologie heute: Ergebnisse, Herausforderungen, Perspektiven, ed. D. Dukić, 137–60. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag. Shefrin, J. 2009. The Dartons: Publishers of Educational Aids, Pastimes & Juvenile Ephemera, 1787–1876. A Bibliographical Checklist. Los Angeles: Cotsen Occasional Press. Stanzel, F. K. 1998. Europäer: Ein imagologischer Essay. Rev. ed. Heidelberg: C. Winter. Stanzel, F. K.. 1999. Zur literarischen Imagologie: Eine Einführung. In Europäischer Völkerspiegel: Imagologisch-ethnographische Studien zu den Völkertafeln des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. F. K. Stanzel, 9–39. Heidelberg: C. Winter. Vallone, L. 2009. Ideas of Difference in Children’s Literature. In The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, ed. M. O. Grenby and A. Immel, 174–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vaughan, J. E. 1972. Aspects of Teaching Geography in England in the Early Nineteenth Century. Paedagogica Historica 12(1): 128–47. Zacharasiewicz, W. 2010. The Theory of Climate and the Tableau of Nationalities. In Zacharasiewicz, Imagology Revisited,67–83. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi.

Figuring the World: Representing Children’s Encounters with Other Peoples at the Great Exhibition of 1851

Gillian Lathey

In the early years of the nineteenth century “little tarry-at-home travellers,” to cite the Reverend Isaac Taylor, could enjoy the vogue for travel narratives and geographical texts without setting foot outside the British Isles. Among many other choices, Taylor’s Scenes in Europe (1818), Scenes in Africa (1820), and Scenes in America (1821), Priscilla Wakefield’s The Juvenile Travellers (1801), and Jehosophat Aspin’s Cosmorama, a View of the Costumes and Peculiarities of All Nations (1826) all introduced children to images and descriptions of the inhabitants of the four corners of the globe. A few privileged children even saw some of these people in the flesh—or occasionally a wax imitation of them—in the traveling displays of ethnic groups that Richard Altick (1978) traces back to the sixteenth century. Thomas Rowlandson’s depiction of a troupe of Laplanders parading their sledge around the Egyptian Hall in 1822 includes child spectators,1 and actor Edmund Yates vividly remembered the wax figures in the

G. Lathey (*) University of Roehampton, London, England

© The Author(s) 2017 71 E. O’Sullivan, A. Immel (eds.), Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8_4 72 G. LATHEY

Chinese Exhibition at Hyde Park Corner in the late 1840s as one of “the places of amusement of my youth” (1884,146). But not until the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations opened at the Crystal Palace in 1851 were other peoples and their artifacts brought to the attention of a far broader public, including children. The exhibition was immense in every sense: it was housed in a vast glass house with four transepts and a gallery, lasted for six months, and recorded some six million visits. Although living human beings were not intentionally on show at an exhibition devoted to manufacturing and trade, exhibitors and visitors from the European continent and the British colonies appear frequently in contemporary reports and images.2 In John Gilbert’s opening illustration in the children’s book The Crystal Palace that Fox Built (1851), for example, a child stands at the center of a busy throng, including an imposing turbaned ﬁgure and two men wearing the traditional Turkish fez (Fig. 4.1). Children’s impatience to view this marvelous event was evident from the start. On the opening day on May 1, “The trees opposite the principal door seemed to have burst out suddenly into a crop of eager boys” (Punch, May 17, 1851, 190). Later, on May 26, began the so-called shilling days (the entry fee had been ﬁve shillings), which enabled less well-to-do families from all over Britain to take their children to the show.3 One of the best-known images of the exhibition (‘The Pound and the Shilling’ Punch 20, 14 June 1851: 240) shows a rapprochement between the offspring of working people (a navvy and a carpenter) and the bourgeoisie, with the children apparently keener than their elders to break social boundaries.4 Adults saw the exhibition as a means to enlighten their young charges, so that school parties were a common sight and indeed an irritant: the Duke of Wellington complained that these children “move in strings!” (Wellington 1927,200).5 AwryPunch cartoon depicts just such a group of Quaker schoolgirls as rather overawed by the experience (July 5, 1851, 22), and Charles Dickens wrote a typically embellished account of the unraveling of one particular string in a letter to Lavinia Watson on July 11, 1851:

One Infant strayed. He was not missed. Ninety and nine were taken home, supposed to be the whole collection, but this particular infant went to Hammersmith. He was found by the Police at night, going round and round the Turnpike—which he still supposed to be a part of the Exhibition. He had the same opinion of the police. Also of Hammersmith FIGURING THE WORLD 73

Fig. 4.1 “The Exhibitors and Visitors” from The Crystal Palace That Fox Built: A Pyramid of Rhyme, with nine illustrations by John Gilbert (London: David Bogue, 1851). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library 74 G. LATHEY

Workhouse, where he passed the night. When his mother came for him in the morning he asked when it would be over? It was a Great Exhibition, he said, but he thought it long. (Dickens 1988, 429)

In view of these school and family visits, children’s authors and publishers quickly produced a variety of material associated with the exhibition for the young, from Lane’s Telescopic View of the Interior of the Great Industrial Exhibition (1851), offering a child’s-eye view of the vastness of the exhibition halls, to the very first Routledge toy book series, Aunt Mavor’s Picturebooks for Little Readers (1852), which was largely devoted to the exhibition.6 Unlike the more intentionally educational volumes for tarry-at-home travelers, the Aunt Mavor booklets (of eight pages) were precursors to the picturebook, with minimal text and half-page illustrations, and were possibly intended as souvenirs. One heavily used format in Great Exhibition publications for children was that of a father or uncle taking children on an instructive tour. Aunts and mothers do not seem to have passed muster as informed companions in these publications; Aunt Mavor, for example, remains a token storyteller found only on the covers. Rather, Uncle Nimrod takes children to the exhibition in three of the titles, just as “Papa” fulfills the same office in the two more substantial books by Samuel Prout Newcombe, discussed later in this chapter. Alphabets based on artifacts from the Great Exhibition and rhymes using the cumulative format of “The House That Jack Built” (The Fine Crystal Palace the Prince Built [1852]; The House That Paxton Built [n.d.]; and The Crystal Palace That Fox Built [1851]), and even a reading primer, The Royal Road to Reading through the Great Exhibition; In Which Those Who Were Too Young to Visit the Exhibition May Learn to Read about It (1852), also by Newcombe, all add to a corpus of texts that sought to select and codify the vast array of exhibits for the child reader.7 As always when considering literature for children, it is important to bear in mind Carolyn Steedman’s words on the difficulty of distinguishing between “real children, living in the time and space of particular societies, and the ideational and figurative force of their existence” (1995, 5). My focus in this chapter is on the latter, the notional child, the child whom adults wished to introduce to the “ephemeral vistas” of international trade exhibitions (Greenhalgh 1988), or the child whom adult authors intended to instruct. What exactly was the adult investment in taking children on a visit, and what was the agenda of those who wrote about and depicted aspects of the exhibition for the young? Here I examine some of the ways FIGURING THE WORLD 75 in which books and images directed the child’s gaze in order to convey didactic visions of difference embodied in the human figure. First, the highlighting of difference in the depiction of overseas visitors to the exhibition introduces stereotypes and their interpretation; next, references to displays of miniature figures representing a variety of nations and cultures lead, finally, to a case study of texts by educator Samuel Prout Newcombe that merge ethnic and national identities through interpretations of the new Victorian science of anthropology.

OVERSEAS VISITORS Both Lord Macaulay’s declaration that he was “struck by the numbers of foreigners in the streets” during the exhibition (quoted in Jennings 2012, 257) and John Gilbert’s image of exhibitors and visitors alert us to what must have been a compelling sight for the young, one that educators and authors seized upon to inform children about other nationalities.8 A publication for teachers, Notes and Sketches of Lessons on Subjects Connected with the Great Exhibition (1852), advised that when seated by the great fountain in the Crystal Palace with her charges, a teacher should draw the children’s attention away from the exhibits to encourage them to observe people and commit their observations to paper: “in all probability, one or more of the party will be struck with the number of foreigners, representing, with few exceptions, all the known nations of the earth” (19). After the visit, the author continues, pupils should point out the relevant nations on a map of the world. Children’s texts were not always so objective in tone or in the manner in which they represented these overseas visitors textually or visually. The Fine Crystal Palace the Prince Built places shadowy, line-drawn foreigners behind colored images of British visitors arriving in London by coach. The accompanying text applies the epithet “strange” to men who, children learn, were once given to scolding, quarreling, and ﬁghting, but instantly changed their ways upon entering the peace-promoting aura of the exhibition. The narrator of The World’s Fair: or, Children’s Prize Gift Book of the Great Exhibition of 1851 also directs the attention of “my dear little friends” (1851, 86) toward otherness:

Only look at the thousands of people who crowd the Park, —and all so different looking, and so curiously dressed. Grave Turks, —swarthy Spaniards and 76 G. LATHEY

Italians, —East Indian Princes, glistening with gold and jewels, —clever French andGermanworkmen,inbluecottonblouses,—Chinese gentlemen, — Tartars, Russians, energetic Americans, and many more (4)

Young readers are encouraged to note aspects of difference as expressed, for example, in the stereotypically exotic “East Indian Princes glistening with gold and jewels.” In a combination of wonderment and pseudoin- struction, foreign visitors become a didactic subject to be used to map the world in a pedagogical text, or a pretext for rehearsing and consolidating well-established national images.

DOLLS AND THE MINIATURE Manufactured figures representing different nationalities and ethnic groups were just as likely to trigger children’s curiosity as living visitors. Miniaturization is a common trope in children’s literature that grants the child reader a sense of power over beings or objects of inferior size (Hancock 2009), reduces the human figure to an object to be petted, commanded, and manipulated, and calls to mind Gaston Bachelard’s comment: “The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it” (1994, 150). In addition to toys and dolls made specifically for children, the exhibition included model scenarios, such as the 150 clay figures engaged in agriculture, fishery, and a variety of domestic tasks in the Indian Court. Designed primarily for adults, these Indian scenes provided an exciting focus for visitors of all ages, as a description from The Illustrated London News indicates:

Merchants expose their wares ...the juggler performs, the story-teller tells his tale, the horseman grooms his Arab steed; the elephant, with grass in his trunk, pricks up his ears as his master beckons to him ...a fakeer or saint begs—it is like a bit in an Indian romance (May 10, 1851, 392)

Illustrations from both The Illustrated London News (September 29, 1851) and The Fine Crystal Palace the Prince Built ([1852]) show children holding on to the guardrail around exhibits from India, gazing at artifacts and figures placed on stands exactly at their eye level. The miniature scenes of life in India drew comment in texts for both children and adults. In contrast to the exhibition’s overarching story of human progress, the imperialist perspective rendered the Indian people as FIGURING THE WORLD 77 infantile and in need of the organizational capabilities of the colonizer. In an article inspired by the displays, The Illustrated London News tenden- tiously asked why India’s people had remained in exactly the same moral, social, and intellectual condition for 300 years (May 31, 1851, 489).9 Samuel Prout Newcombe, proselytizing editor of the Christian journal Pleasant Pages, presented the models as insights into an uncivilized, technically backward society in two Great Exhibition books for children: Little Henry’s Holiday at the Great Exhibition (1851) and Fireside Facts from the Great Exhibition ([1851]). The father in Little Henry’s Holiday, for instance, dwells to such an extent on the gruesome model depicting the punishment of miscreants—“iron hooks run through their flesh, and with these they are drawn up to a great height, and swung round in the air”—that W., the son, expresses heartfelt relief that he was not born in India (1851, 128). However, a different type of miniature figure—a quartet of dolls—would lead Newcombe and his young readers into the new and uncertain territory of anthropology. Dolls and toys made of any kind of material—wax, rag, tin, bone, or sugar—were so popular with young visitors that at one stand of warlike mechanical figures the correspondent of the Great Exhibition toy supplement to The Illustrated London News had to fight his way through “a dense mob of children who were greedily devouring the whole with their eyes” (November 8, 1851, 579).10 Other displays of dolls dressed in national or ethnic costume naturally appear in children’s books on the exhibition. Dolls and Sights of the Crystal Palace (1852), a title from the Routledge toy book series, features a lively group of Mexican dolls and an illustration of a carefully staged collection of dolls from “the four quarters of the world” (Fig. 4.2). This quartet encapsulates contemporary thought on the lineage of humankind by following the categories first established by Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) in the mid-eighteenth century—namely, Homo americanus, Homo europaeus, Homo asiaticus, and Homo africanus. The European is a female figure in contemporary dress bearing a flower, symbolic of the gentle powers of civilization; the commanding Turk, with his standard robes, turban, and flourishing beard, represents both Asia and a nation that was shortly to become Britain’s ally in the Crimean War; the “copper- coloured” African, dressed in the clothes of an American slave rather than in African ethnic dress, kneels in a subordinate pose; and, finally, the disdainful look of the American echoes the proud demeanor found in George Catlin’s paintings of Native Americans that had been on show in 78 G. LATHEY

Fig. 4.2 Illustration from Dolls and Sights of the Crystal Palace, Aunt Mavor’s picturebooks for little readers, no. 12 (London: Routledge, 1852), 6. Courtesy of V&A Images

London in 1840. Clothing and the relative positioning of the dolls are therefore indicative of political developments in Europe, the aftermath of slavery, and the vogue for images of the “noble savage.”

ANTHROPOLOGY AND GENEALOGY Samuel Prout Newcombe used these very same four dolls in his own publications as a catalyst to convey to children the ethnographic spirit of the times. The new science of anthropology—known at the time as FIGURING THE WORLD 79 ethnology and defined as the comparative study of different peoples, their religions, cultures, and artifacts—pre-dated Darwinian theory. The Ethnological Society was founded in 1843, and the ethnological subsection of the British Association for the Advancement of Science was created in 1847. Newcombe was doubtless influenced by the urge toward categorization, which dominated the work of biological scientists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and which Michel Foucault subsequently interrogated in his archaeology of the human sciences, The Order of Things (1970). Debates raged as to whether human beings were descended from one species (monogenesis) or whether ethnic groups had developed separately (polygenesis), and models of racial categorization proliferated. Swedish anatomist Anders Retzius (1742–1821), for example, divided humankind into the dolichocephalic (long and thin skulls) and the brachycephalic (short and broad skulls).11 Links were also made between ethnicity and representations of the development of languages into branching “families.”12 Elements of these theories filtered into children’s books published across the nineteenth century. Examples include the first volume of the The Minor’s Magazine, which consisted of a treatise entitled The History of Man, in a Savage and Civilized State (1802). It adopted an early German variation of the Linnaean classification of humankind by a Dr. Gmelin, professor of natural history in Göttingen (4–5). Children’s writers sought to engage young readers with this new science, although Captain Mayne Reid, author of Odd People: Being a Popular Description of the Singular Races of Man (1860), remained skeptical, telling his child readers that “learned ethnolo- gists are ever loth to a confession of limited knowledge” (230). It is no surprise, then, to find that in both Little Henry’s Holiday at the Great Exhibition (1851) and Fireside Facts from the Great Exhibition ([1851]), Samuel Prout Newcombe draws on ill-digested contemporary theories to indulge in anthropological instruction.13 As Little Henry’s family group pauses before the same four dolls depicted in Dolls and Sights of the Crystal Palace, Papa assures his children that “each doll represents the character of the race it belongs to” (1851, 80), thus following Linnaean classification. He limits his ensuing disquisition on racial descent, however, to the ethnic groups of Europe. Two principal families, he tells the children, characterize the “European race”: “Those with broad foreheads, fair complexions, blue eyes, light hair” represent the Germanic family, and those with “the dark complexion, with longer face, and with dark hair and eyes, may well represent the Celtic family” (135). 80 G. LATHEY

Papa extols the “industrial virtues” and solidity of the Germanic family in contrast to the acute and active imagination of the Celts. In conclusion, he begins to ask, “If you were to call on a dark-haired, long-faced Frenchman, and say, ‘Which do you love best, this cheese or this diamond brooch?’ he would say ...” Here, young Henry interrupts, hardly able to contain himself: “‘Give me the diamond brooch,’ he would say. ‘Give the lumpy Dutchman that lumpy cheese. I value beautiful things’” (137). In this exchange between father and son, a longstanding British stereotype of the French as enthralled by fashion and superficial aesthetics is pressed into service in what appears to be an ethnic division (see Chapter 2 by Silke Meyer). Newcombe confuses ethnic and cultural characteristics as he combines elements of contemporary anthropological thought—the dolichocephalic and brachycephalic distinction, for example—with terms taken from the linguistic branch of ethnology—namely, the Germanic and Celtic families usually used to denote groups of languages. The result is a value-laden distinction between solid and reliable Germanic Europeans and the frivolous, if imaginative, Celts. Underlying this spurious taxonomy of European national characteristics there lurks a pernicious binary opposition between the savage and the civilized. In Fireside Facts,Newcombe’s narrator tells the children that “a savage”—he defines the type no further—has no notion of cultural niceties and would counter any question on dress etiquette with “Put a ring in your nose” or “Tattoo thy face with black markings” ([1851], 198). A contrast between the representative of an undefined mass of humanity scattered across the globe and a civilized western European contributes to the meta- narrative of progress from “savagery” toward civilization that underpins responses to the India exhibit or representations of overseas visitors in Great Exhibition picturebooks.14 It is a dichotomy that characterizes many nineteenth-century anthropological texts for children that do not explicitly discuss Europe, such as Mrs. Percy Sinnett’s Hunters and Fishers: or, Sketches of Primitive Races in the Lands Beyond the Sea (1846), or Mayne Reid’s Odd People. Reid even distinguishes between two kinds of Amazonian tribe: “the true savage” and the “demi-semicivilized savage” (1860, 43). Newcombe, then, builds in his Great Exhibition texts an ethnic genealogy that encompasses national identity and expresses a pre-existing notion of the spectrum from the savage to the civilized that is largely restricted to non-European peoples. Yet one European nation, Russia, is depicted as lying at the savage end of the spectrum—perhaps “demi-semicivilized” at best. This position can be attributed to political causes—namely, the FIGURING THE WORLD 81 realignment of European allegiances in the run-up to the Crimean War of 1853–1856 that resulted in the infiltration of Russophobia into British children’s texts. Consciously or unconsciously influenced by Johann Gottfried von Herder’s argument that national character is the unique outcome of a people’s environmental, historical, and spiritual experience (Stocking 1987, 20), Newcombe assigns the inhospitable landscape and climate of Russia a leading role in defining national identity. As Joep Leerssen argues in his cultural history of national thought in Europe, “One of the great rationalizations for the new characterological anthropology of Europe’s nations is by way of climate” (2006, 65). Thus we learn in Fireside Facts that in the harsh winters the Russians bandage their legs with “coarse cloth or flannel” and wear shoes “made of linden bark” ([1851], 206). Such basic clothing confirms the view of Russians in Little Henry’s Holiday as a primitive people: “the chief distinction of their character is, perhaps, a love of brute force; many of them are in rather a savage state” (1851, 148). Other Great Exhibition books follow the same standard trope of an extreme and inhospitable climate. In The World’s Fair, the narrator insists that Russia is “not such a pleasant country as those I have been telling you of” (1851, 19) and suffers winter frosts that kill many people. Newcombe’s perspective on Russia is sealed with a scientific explanation that may owe much to the work of ethnologist Robert Gordon Latham, who resorted to linguistic cues in his Natural History of the Varieties of Man (1850) to assign racial origin and made frequent use of the category “Mongolian.” In Little Henry, Papa claims that the Russians are neither Celtic nor Germanic but members of the “Sclavonic” race formed by the union of the Germans with the Mongolian peoples (Newcombe 1851, 148). The implication that Russia can barely count as a European nation consolidates reductive descriptions based on climate into descriptions influenced by political undercurrents. Once again, Newcombe’s application of the nascent science of ethnology contributes a little and dangerous knowledge to the process of pinning national and ethnic identities to the world map.

CONCLUDING REMARKS What conclusions can be drawn from adult manipulation of children’s responses to encounters with other peoples and their artifacts at the Great Exhibition? First, it appears that authors and illustrators frequently 82 G. LATHEY merged linguistic, ethnic, and national identities in line with contemporary pseudoscientific discourse, existing national stereotypes, and colonial power structures. Joep Leerssen identifies just such a blurring of the national and the ethnic in his cultural history of national thought in Europe: “Over time, we see that the concept of a nation can be used with an emphasis either on the social, the cultural or the racial aspect; usage is particularly slippery from case to case” (2006, 16). Nationality may also become the signifier of a racial category, a “slipperiness” that is evident in the image of the four dolls based on Linnaean categories, where the turbaned Turk, a prominent Western national stereotype of the period, represents the entire Asian racial group as defined by Linnaeus. National costume may represent a particular ethnic group, just as alleged physical features of ethnicity may be applied to one or more nations. Therefore, representations of both national and ethnic identity as conceived by illustrators, children’s authors, and scientists in thenineteenthcenturymustbestudiedinparallel. Second, the focus on difference, scientific categorization, and the superiority of the Western world in children’s texts sits uneasily with the theme of international harmony that the exhibition organizers set out to display, at least according to its accompanying discourse. Ethnology was a natural scientific adjunct to the exhibition, as indicated by Prince Albert’s speech announcing the project in 1849. The exhibition would, he argued, embody “the realisation of the unity of mankind” and would emphasize rather than level “the peculiar characteristics of the different nations of the earth” (cited in Newcombe [1851], 22). Difference viewed positively was the stated aim of the exhibition; yet in children’s books a tension exists between this public rhetoric of internationalism and peace, and the use of reductive stock images or quasianthropological categories. In Dolls and Sights of the Crystal Palace, one illustration that precedes the image of the four dolls demonstrating Linnaean racial divisions (Fig. 4.2) seems to unite dolls of all nations and ethnicities in a merry dance of disparate pairs (Fig. 4.3)—for example, a kilted Scotsman partners with a black doll in Western dress. Yet the dance takes place at the foot of a commanding statue of Britannia,who,despiteprofferinga laurel branch as a symbol of peace, stands high on a plinth above the dancing figures and displays a shield bearing the Union Jack design. Thus the image as a whole is redolent of the dominant world of the British Empire. Idealized visions of international accord and a joyful advance FIGURING THE WORLD 83

Fig. 4.3 Illustration from Dolls and Sights of the Crystal Palace, Aunt Mavor’s picturebooks for little readers, no. 12 (London: Routledge, 1852), 7. Courtesy of V&A Images toward global communication, trade, and unity therefore coexist with scientiﬁc, imperialist, and politically motivated imagery and discourse that separates and subordinates. Images in children’stextsarisingfrom the Great Exhibition ultimately fail the exhibition’s professed purpose to promote international harmony and instead conﬁrm Thijs Weststeijn’s thesis that the “nineteenth century witnessed a surge in the stereotypical portrayal of others, triggered by the World Fairs that presented peoples from other continents to Europeans, usually in the context of ‘orientalist’ attitudes inspired by colonial power relations” (2007,452). 84 G. LATHEY

Finally, to return to Steedman’s distinction between the real and the ideational child, what may “real” children have made of the “great eggs and bacon,” as it was commonly known?15 Only a painstaking trawl for retrospective accounts will reveal any scraps of information that may still exist. In the meantime, we can surmise that Dickens’s lost child who “thought it long,” the “string” of distracted Quaker schoolgirls, the eager young spectators jostling for position at the miniature displays or catching sight of foreign visitors, or the child in John Gilbert’s image from The Crystal Palace That Fox Built (see Fig. 4.1), so transfixed by a spectacle beyond the viewer’s field of vision that he remains unaware of the splendid man in a turban beside him, are perhaps fleeting indications that children saw other realities than those programmed by would-be educators, and imagined difference after their own inimitable fashion.

NOTES 1. Reproduced by Altick (1978, 274). 2. As Lara Kriegel (2001) suggests in her essay on the Indian presence at the Crystal Palace, the division of exhibits into the categories of raw materials, machinery, manufactures, and fine arts, which underpinned the organization of the exhibition in its entirety, militated against the representation of industrial or agricultural workers; it was only subsequent world’s fairs that put working villages and their inhabitants on display. 3. The cost of entry from May 1 had been five shillings; from May 26, entry was one shilling on Mondays to Thursdays, two shillings and sixpence on Fridays, and five shillings on Saturdays. 4. Steve Edwards (2001, 30) points out that the distinctive dress of these figures indicates their professions. 5. The philanthropist Miss Burdett Coutts paid for 445 pupils and nine teachers to attend the Great Exhibition at the insistence of Prince Albert. 6. I am indebted to Tomoko Masaki (2006) for bibliographical information about the publication and format of this series. Thirteen titles were published in 1852, with a fourteenth appearing in 1853. Eleven of the fourteen titles are devoted to the Great Exhibition and are listed under Aunt Mavor in the references. 7. Prince Albert was involved in the conception of the Great Exhibition, Joseph Paxton designed the glass Crystal Palace, and Charles Fox was iron contractor and engineer for the project. 8. However, Richard Pearson (2001) notes the disappointment recorded in Punch (May 1, 1851, 207) that the promised number of overseas visitors had not materialized. FIGURING THE WORLD 85

9. Charles Dickens made a similar comment about China when he compared the two countries on display at the Great Exhibition that had made the greatest progress and the least: England and China. He characterized the Chinese Collection established close to Hyde Park as that of a people who came to “a dead stop, Heaven knows how many hundred years ago” (1851, 357). 10. The display was that of the Widow Hallers of Vienna. 11. Retzius also described an intermediary category, the mesaticephalic. According to George W. Stocking Jr., Retzius “used his system to recon- struct European racial history” (1987, 65). 12. Largely thanks to the work of Franz Bopp on the classification of languages into families, linguistic commonalities were thought to indicate racial affi- nity, so that, as Foucault comments, “the constitution of historicity in the sphere of grammar took place in accordance with the same model as in the science of living beings” (1970, 305). 13. Similarities between the two books are explained when we learn in a meta- fictive aside at the beginning of Fireside Facts that Papa is in fact engaged in writing Little Henry’s Holiday. 14. Papa in Little Henry’s Holiday does pinpoint Africa as “the least civilized part of the world” (1851, 160). 15. See “The Great Eggs and Bacon” from Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor by Jennings (2012, 253).

REFERENCES

Primary Sources Children’s Books on the Great Exhibition Aunt Mavor’s Picturebooks for Little Readers. 1852. London: Routledge. The Old Cornish Woman (no. 1). Alphabet of Foreign Things (no. 2). Uncle Nimrod’s First Visit to the Exhibition (no. 3). Old Mother Bunch (no. 5). Alphabet of the Exhibition (no. 6). Uncle Nimrod’s Second Visit to the Exhibition (no. 7). Alphabet of English Things (no. 8). Ploucquet’s Stuffed Animals (no. 9) The Exhibition and Grand London Sights (no. 10). Uncle Nimrod’s Third Visit to the Exhibition (no. 11). Dolls and Sights of the Crystal Palace (no. 12). The Crystal Palace That Fox Built: A Pyramid of Rhyme. 1851. With nine illustrations by John Gilbert. London: David Bogue. 86 G. LATHEY

The Fine Crystal Palace the Prince Built. [1852]. London: Dean & Son. The House That Paxton Built: A Gift Book from the Great National Exhibition. n.d. London: Darton & Co. Lane’s Telescopic View of the Interior of the Great Industrial Exhibition. 1851. Lithographed and Printed at C. Moody’s Lithographic Establishment. London: C. Lane. Notes and Sketches of Lessons on Subjects Connected with the Great Exhibition. 1852. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Newcombe, S. P. [1851]. Fireside Facts from the Great Exhibition: Being an Amusing Series of Object Lessons on the Food and Clothing of All Nations in the Year 1851. London: Houlston and Stoneman. Newcombe, S. P. 1851. Little Henry’s Holiday at the Great Exhibition. London: Houlston and Stoneman. Newcombe, S. P. [1852]. The Royal Road to Reading Through the Great Exhibition; In Which Those Who Were Too Young to Visit the Exhibition May Learn to Read About It. London: Houlston and Stoneman. The World’s Fair: or, Children’s Prize Gift Book of the Great Exhibition of 1851; Describing the Beautiful Inventions and Manufactures Exhibited Therein; With Pretty Stories About the People Who Have Made and Sent Them; And How They Live When at Home. 1851. London: Thomas Dean and Son.

Other Children’s Books Aspin, J. [1826]. Cosmorama: A View of the Costumes and Peculiarities of All Nations. London: J. Harris. The History of Man, in a Savage and Civilized State: Written in Familiar Stile, and Adapted to the Capacities of Youth, Being Vol. 1 of the Minor’s Magazine. [1802]. London: Tegg and Castleman. Reid, Capt. Mayne. 1860. Odd People, Being a Popular Description of Singular Races of Man. London: Routledge. Sinnett, Mrs. P. 1846. Hunters and Fishers: Or, Sketches of Primitive Races in the Lands Beyond the Sea. London: Chapman and Hall. Taylor, Rev. I. 1818. Scenes in Europe, for the Amusement and Instruction of Little Tarry-at-home Travellers. London: J. Harris. Taylor, Rev. I. 1820. Scenes in Africa, for the Amusement and Instruction of Little Tarry-at-home Travellers. London: Harris and Son. Taylor, Rev. I. 1821. Scenes in America, for the Amusement and Instruction of Little Tarry-at-home Travellers. London: Harris and Son. Wakeﬁeld, P. 1801. The Juvenile Travellers; Containing the Remarks of a Family During a Tour Through the Principal States and Kingdoms of Europe. London: Darton and Harvey. FIGURING THE WORLD 87

Secondary Sources Altick, R. D. 1978. The Shows of London. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bachelard, G. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Trans. M. Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Dickens, C. 1851. The Great Exhibition and the Little One. Household Words 3 (July 5): 356–60. Dickens, C. 1988. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. 6: 1850–1852. Edited by Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Nina Burgis. Pilgrim Edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Edwards, S. 2001. The Accumulation of Knowledge, or, William Whewell’s Eye. In The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. L. Purbrick, 26–52. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Foucault, M. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. from the French. London, New York: Routledge. Greenhalgh, P. 1988. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’sFairs,1851–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hancock, S. 2009. The Child That Haunts Us: Symbols and Images in Fairytale and Miniature Literature. London, New York: Routledge. Jennings, H. 2012. Pandaemonium 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers. 2nd ed. London: Icon Books. Kriegel, L. 2001. Narrating the Subcontinent in 1851: India at the Crystal Palace. In The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. L. Purbrick, 146–78. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Latham, R. G. 1850. The Natural History of the Varieties of Man. London: John van Voorst. Leerssen, J. 2006. National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Masaki, Tomoko. 2006. A History of Victorian Popular Picturebooks: The Aesthetic, Creative, and Technological Aspects of the Toy Book Through the Publications of the Firm of Routledge, 1852–1893. Tokyo: Kazamashobo. Newman, G., et al. 2008. Echoes from the Past: World History to the 16th Century. Toronto: McGraw-Hill. Pearson, R. 2001. Thackeray and Punch at the Great Exhibition: Authority and Ambivalence in Verbal and Visual Caricatures. In The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. L. Purbrick, 177–205. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Steedman, C. 1995. Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stocking, G. W., Jr. 1987. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press. Wellington, Wellesley A. Duke of. 1927. A Great Man’s Friendship: Letters of the Duke of Wellington to Mary, Marchioness of Salisbury, 1850–1852. Edited by Lady Burghclere. London: John Murray. 88 G. LATHEY

Weststeijn, T. 2007. Visual Arts. In Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey, ed. M. Beller and J. Leerssen, 451–6. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Yates, E. 1884. Edmund Yates: His Recollections and Experiences. London: Richard Bentley and Son.

Gillian Lathey is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton, UK, where before retirement she was Reader in Children’s Literature and Director of the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature. Her publications include The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature: Invisible Storytellers (2010), Grimms’ Tales around the Globe: The Dynamics of their International Reception (co-edited with Vanessa Joosen [2014]), and Translating Children’s Literature: Translation Practices Explained (2015). CHAPTER 5

Imagining the World in Bavarian Children’s Books: Place and Other as Engineered by Lothar Meggendorfer

Amanda M. Brian

Even though Lothar Meggendorfer (1847–1925), the famous illustrator and engineer of children’s movable picturebooks, produced a variety of images and materials that found wide audiences beyond his home base in Bavaria, his impact is still imperfectly understood. He has been overshadowed by Wilhelm Busch and Adolph Oberländer, his talented colleagues at the popular Munich- based illustrated weekly papers Fliegende Blätter and Münchener Bilderbogen, and—ironically enough—by his own movable children’s books, fascinating novelty items whose innovative mechanical illustrations have attracted the enthusiasm of collectors and scholars (Bahar 1983; Meggendorfer 1985). Meggendorfer was involved in so many aspects of the publishing world of illustrated satire and humor that he loaned his own name and editorial expertise to another such illustrated periodical, Meggendorfer-Blätter,with which he was associated between 1888 and 1905. Its ﬁfty-seven issues, containing jokes, poems, and short stories, were known for “high artistic

A.M. Brian (*) Department of History, Coastal Carolina University, Conway, South Carolina, USA

© The Author(s) 2017 89 E. O’Sullivan, A. Immel (eds.), Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8_5 90 A.M. BRIAN quality” (Meggendorfer-Blätter 1888–1944). This collective enterprise—the simultaneous production of work for newspapers and for children—needs to be understood in terms of creative and practical cross-fertilization. The firm of Braun & Schneider, where Meggendorfer began his career as an illustrator, published Fliegende Blätter as well as Münchener Bilderbogen,andalso brought out Meggendorfer’s first children’s books, including some with movable illustrations. J. F. Schreiber, headquartered at Esslingen, published both Meggendorfer-Blätter and numerous children’s books by Meggendorfer (Meggendorfer 1975). Meggendorfer’s name sold various genres of humorously illustrated texts, which were simultaneously translated and reproduced for consumers of all ages throughout Europe and the United States, and all of these connections suggest a multigenerational audience for his productions. Newspaper editors in Europe and the United States reproduced the jokes and witticisms—and often the illustrations—from Meggendorfer- Blätter (and other German humorous journals and broadsides), attesting to a greater circulation of Meggendorfer’s name and content than often considered by scholars of children’s literature. One of the keys to Meggendorfer’s popularity was his clearly developed stock characters— for example, the bloated gentleman who, in a three-part illustration reproduced in the New-York Tribune, slowly falls into a serving bowl as he reaches over the table to join in a toast at a club (“Mr. Fatman’s Mishap” 1903, 15). Such caricatures figured prominently in his illustrations both for the humorous magazines and for his children’s books, and this kind of mockery of social customs, particularly those of the middle classes, translated well across ages and regions. I contend, however, that his books for children immersed that audience in a particular worldview (Abate 2012; Higonnet 2014). Illustrated genres have lent themselves to humor involving human differences (see Chapter 9 by Lara Saguisag), and Meggendorfer often explored differences of class as well as race for children and adults. Having elsewhere explained how this work was accomplished with the iconography of animals (Brian 2014), here I focus on the depiction of national and ethnic identities in Meggendorfers (as they are known), in which class and race, occupation and geography are intertwined. In particular, I draw attention to his human figures, including several illustrations that have been ignored. His goal seemed to be to facilitate European and American children’s understanding of their world through categories or types. Emer O’Sullivan has described children’s literature as “a socializing agent that IMAGINING THE WORLD IN BAVARIAN CHILDREN’S BOOKS ... 91 introduces children to their first images of foreign peoples” (2011, 688). Meggendorfers were no exception. The illustrator introduced his young consumers to certain caricatures, perhaps at the same time as he introduced them to his adult audience. To understand the operation of race and class in Meggendorfers, it is revealing to begin with how he saw himself, other professionals, and fellow inhabitants of south central Europe. Many of the people illustrated time and again by Meggendorfer represented occupations or professions common across central Europe. He certainly depicted himself in professional terms. In Gute Bekannte (Good Friends, 1879), which features several of these figures, Meggendorfer showed himself standing at an easel, paints and brushes in hand, wearing a somber gray suit, and accepting payment for his work as an artist. The initials “L.M.” carved at the top of the easel deliberately give away the self-portrait. His identity is tied to his paid labor as an artist and illustrator, revealing widespread practices of professionalization in Germany in the late nineteenth century (Cocks and Jarausch 1990). Meggendorfer portrayed professions both broadly defined and seemingly modern and traditional. For example, the figure of the photo- grapher is identified by his equipment and bourgeois sensibility, just as the figure of the blacksmith is by his forge and manual labor. Gute Bekannte also features a chimney sweep and a postman, who were neither academi- cally trained nor state certified—the hallmarks of professionalization in the second half of the nineteenth century—but portrayed respectfully. While his own image may be presented matter-of-factly without any of his typical humor, elsewhere Meggendorfer found comedy in professionals ostensibly like himself. Consider his figure of the old doctor, who appears at odds with the growing contemporary emphasis on modernity. In Immer Lustig! (Always Jolly!, ca. 1886), the doctor attempts to swat a wily fly. This pull-tab book follows the formula of a short poem on the left and the movable illustration on the right. The poem “Die schlaue Fliege” (The Clever Fly) describes how the fly manages to escape in the nick of time, every time. Here is a classic Meggendorfer figure, with large eyes, big mouth and nose, and ruddy complexion. The artist seemed to draw inspiration from his work with puppets, for the physiognomies were similar across his creative endeavors (Krahé 1978). This is a visual language of humor familiar to his audiences: whites of the eyes dominate the face, the nose is emphasized by an extended bridge, and the rosy cheeks and nose imply at once cheerfulness, exertion, and imbibing. Meggendorfer’s typical figure is taken to the extreme in his portrayal of 92 A.M. BRIAN

Kasper, the comic character in traditional German puppet theater, very similar to the English Mr. Punch (Weinkauff 1992). The doctor is a more subdued version of, and at least a generation apart from, Kasper, and his robes and long porcelain pipe mark him as rather distinguished and distinctly German.1 It was funny, then, to have this man outsmarted by an insect in Immer Lustig! The wealthy white man could certainly be the butt of a joke. Meggendorfer also frequently poked fun at bourgeois pretention, delighting in deflating a character’s self-importance. This was done without malice in Trick or Treat (a 1981 English-language reproduction of Nur für brave Kinder [Only for Good Children], ca. 1896), a book with slat transformations, in which a pull tab draws four horizontal bars over the original image in a seeming dissolution of one illustration into another. One dissolving picture features “The Proud Horseman,” who appears elegantly riding a horse in the first image, only to miss the jump in the second image. The accompanying poem in the English-language reproduction states the obvious: “pride comes before the fall” (n.p.). Another illustration in Trick or Treat, “A Day in the Country,” shows a respectable middle-class family out for a Sunday stroll in their finest fashion; a pull of the tab brings on a sudden downpour, in which they are soaked, even thrashed. Children were encouraged to laugh at the family’s misfortune: the patriarch, in a flashy suit, leads the charge to shelter, pushing the buggy and wearing a handkerchief on his head; the mother’s umbrella flips open and she clutches her skirt high, exposing her abundant petticoats; the eldest daughter falls face first on the ground; and the nanny, now clutching the toddler and her own shoes, elects to run barefoot. The dramatic turn of events exposes an undignified aspect of the bourgeois family; the humor was at once self-deprecating and cutting. The artist, as editor of Meggendorfer-Blätter, encouraged people to laugh at the Bildungsbürgertum, the educated and cultured segment of the German middle class. In 1903 he published a full-page color litho- graph by his colleague Hans Horina that imagines the scene “If Goethe were to write poetry today in the Weimar Park” (Horina 1903, 6).2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is mobbed by well-dressed men and women, one of whom brandishes an autograph album at the writer, while multiple photographers aim their cameras at him, capturing his puzzled look. (In 1906, James Keeley of the Chicago Tribune would recruit Horina, Meggendorfer, and four other cartoonists in the “German invasion” of the newspaper’s comics section [McGurk 2012].) IMAGINING THE WORLD IN BAVARIAN CHILDREN’S BOOKS ... 93

Before turning to Meggendorfer’s representation of difference in “foreign peoples,” I want to show how he differentiated nominally white central Europeans, another group of which he was a member. He explored national and ethnic divisions close to his home in central Europe: Bavarians, Black Foresters, Tyroleans, Viennese, and so on. As Silke Meyer asserts in Chapter 2, children’s book illustrators developed these visual representations of difference. Even among German-speaking neighbors, presumably unique characteristics were highlighted by costumes and landscapes. This was a local vision of Germany, a celebration of provincials that inextricably bound diversity and unity in a unique vision of nationalism, as described by historian Celia Applegate (1990; see also Hüppauf and Umbach 2005). Arguably, it was also a transnational vision, for the differences among Europeans were never as stark as the differences between Europeans and non-Europeans. In depicting so many rural places in illustrations, Meggendorfer was not denigrating modernization, although these images invite nostalgia today, but was displaying distinctions within the supposedly top racial category. The increasing circulation and thus familiarity with various “others” demonstrated his grasp and even embrace of the expanding world. Meggendorfer was further grounding his young audiences in this modern world, providing additional identification charts of human types. For example, in Für brave Kinder (For Good Children, ca. 1890), the front cover and opening illustration feature a sister and brother (as explained in the accompanying poem). Only the sister, Grethe, is named. They appear in a traditional garb of south central Europe. The scene is an isolated orchard, complete with a half-timbered house in the background. Inside the book they shake a pear tree loaded with ripe fruit. No fewer than eight rivets set the scene in motion. The children are enthralled with their agricultural task. A few pages later in Für brave Kinder, a similarly provincial Bavarian family battles wind and waves in a rowboat. The pull tab controls the father’s rowing actions as the boat dips and rises on the lake. He wears lederhosen, while the mother and son (named Jakob in the accompanying stanza) also wear traditional outfits with requisite hats. The puppy is calm at the bottom of the rocking boat. The backdrop features a high, partially forested hill with a small town nestled between its base and the lakeshore. A prominent building with two steeples stands at the closest edge. The landscape is easily and generically identifiable as one of the numerous lakes surrounding the Alpine region of central Europe. In these and other examples, the type of person was secondary, even incidental, to the 94 A.M. BRIAN drama or visual story. Who they were, in other words, did not drive the activities that Meggendorfer tackled, in contrast to, say, the dandies discussed below. They are typical snapshots in the everyday lives of ordinary German-speaking Europeans. In depicting European ethnicities, the mobility of the illustrations seemed to matter most to Meggendorfer. Shaking a pear tree and rowing a rocking boat were innocuous activities. They simply made dramatic movements on the page. Nevertheless, as we have seen, no one was really immune from Meggendorfer’s mockery. In Aufgepaßt! (Watch Out!, ca. 1900), a woman’s traditional costume places her in the Alpine region even if the accompanying stanza does not mention Tyrol. She strums a guitar with a pull of the tab, while her mouth remains fixed open in song—ayodel,tobeprecise.The humor falls to the poem, then, which contrasts her delicate appearance, tight ringlets of hair, and dainty choker necklace with her forceful yodeling. Another Tyrolean singer, this time a man, is highlighted in Lebende Bilder (Living Pictures, ca. 1887). The accompanying stanza praises his singing voice. These two images are half-length portraits—an indication that a certain type, or category, of person is being shown. It is clear that Meggendorfer operated with a racial hierarchy in mind, so now I turn to explicit examples of othering in his children’s books. The artist articulated patterns of representing “others” in several picturebooks without words, which targeted the youngest and non-reading children. These purely pictorial items invited caretakers, parents, and relatives to reinforce a hierarchically ordered worldview when reading or discussing the images with their children. In Des Kindes erstes Buch (The Child’s First Book, ca. 1894), Meggendorfer depicted a variety of objects as well as people and animals. The first page includes a chalkboard easel, a cow, and, separately, a cowbell, a barrel, a snail, and a female gardener. At best the images are tangentially connected; see the rabbits and dyed Easter eggs, and the caterpillar, leaf, and moth, among other images, on the second page. Meggendorfer inserted some of his best-loved themes, such as animals and music, and his favorite characters, such as the animated musician, the extravagantly dressed dandy, and the African child. He returned to these caricatures again and again, milking them for humor that at once supported and, at times, may have undermined the white, wealthy man’s place at the top of civilization. This worldview supported such common justificatory ideologies as nationalism and imperialism in western Europe and the United States. Meggendorfer’s oeuvre, which included as many, if not more, non- IMAGINING THE WORLD IN BAVARIAN CHILDREN’S BOOKS ... 95 movable children’s books as movable ones, dramatically illuminated the historical period in which Germany became a nation and, subsequently, an imperial power. His appeal and his perspective operated at once locally and globally—not in a “glocal” blurring of space but in a transnational awareness of Europe’s late nineteenth-century reach and pull. Meggendorfer played with national and ethnic stereotypes, turning his attention to differentiate and caricature central Europeans, as we have seen, as well as Africans and Asians. The images of peoples and places both familiar and exotic served as fodder for Meggendorfer’s humor, another underanalyzed aspect of his work. Although representations of “others” had long circulated in the West, Meggendorfer’s illustrations were rarely wholesale imitations downsized for children’s consumption. What emerged, instead, from his works was a lay, or popular, concept of a worldwide racial hierarchy that was both fixed and pliable, and readily consumed by children as well as adults. Although we know that children, especially middle-class children who were often surrounded by familial and hired caretakers, were read to and read with, Helga Lüdtke’s study of children’s public reading rooms has revealed something more about reading habits around the turn of the twentieth century. She discovered that children, often working-class children who were the target of social reformers supporting the reading rooms, were reading below their grade level: “it was not uncommon for 12 to 14 year olds to ask for picturebooks” (1987, 179). Librarians lamented superficial reading and sought to encourage intelligent reading habits, including reading a book from cover to cover; nonetheless, “the children were almost everywhere allowed to choose for themselves what they wanted to read from lists or catalogues” (180). Although Meggendorfers—with a preponderance of images and emphasis on entertainment, which librarians rejected as a purpose of book reading—did not necessarily equate to intelligent reading, they could have held the attention of children across a wide age range long enough for thorough investigation. Careful consideration, then, should be given to the range of ages of the people interacting with Meggendorfers, even the least loquacious of these books. The introduction to foreign peoples that they provided was staggered and also reinforced throughout childhood, ado- lescence, and adulthood. In a beautifully simplistic picturebook without any words, Nimm mich mit! Ein lehrreiches Bilderbuch (Take with You! An Instructionally Rich Picturebook, ca. 1887), Meggendorfer explicitly creates categories to 96 A.M. BRIAN educate. He groups types of hat, musical instrument, and tool among numerous other familiar objects, as well as animals, both domestic and exotic. He also lays out a clear racial hierarchy. Depicting disembodied heads in profile, reminiscent of an anthropological study, he displays males of the supposed following regressive racial categories: Caucasian, Jewish, Turkish, Japanese, Chinese, Native American, South Pacific, and African (see Figs. 5.1 and 5.2). The book was designed as a kind of catalogue—small enough that a young child could take it into the “field and meadow” and “in the garden, in the room” to examine nature and material goods (1).3 The instruction was meant to be hands on, and children were to differentiate among types of beverages and transportation, for example, and other everyday objects, as well as types of animal and human. Thus Meggendorfers trained children to determine difference or essence visually based on these stereotypical images. In Meggendorfer’s complete oeuvre, however, people do not always conform to this Haeckelian evolution of man, even though his racial line-up does. Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) popularized the theories of Charles Darwin in Germany, perpetuated social Darwinism, and espoused additional theories that linked racial characteristics with the environment and maintained that the human individual rapidly repeated the course of evolution. Meggendorfer, too, linked race to environment, as we will see below, and blurred human–animal divisions in ways that suggested Haeckelian cultural infusion. But Meggendorfer’s portrayal of race did not simply repeat social Darwinian ideas.

Fig. 5.1 Illustrations from Lothar Meggendorfer, Nimm mich mit! Ein lehrreiches Bilderbuch, 3rd ed. (Munich: Braun & Schneider, ca. 1887). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library IMAGINING THE WORLD IN BAVARIAN CHILDREN’S BOOKS ... 97

Fig. 5.2 Illustrations from Lothar Meggendorfer, Nimm mich mit! Ein lehrreiches Bilderbuch, 3rd ed. (Munich: Braun & Schneider, ca. 1887). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library

Meggendorfer’s “othering” can also be teased out of his non-movable children’s book Gute Bekannte, which features full-page illustrations with short poems at the bottom of the pages. For example, Meggendorfer presented a rather equanimous image of a male Turk. While he wears the requisite red fez—a common element in caricatures to identify the “other” as part of an exotic Muslim and often North African community with ties to slavery (Kusser 2010)—and is featured in profile, he is receiving a letter from an officially dressed German postman. The accompanying poem describes the action of the postman, who is “well known” and “often comes to the house,” bringing “letters from all corners of the globe.” Thus, the postman facilitates non-threatening foreign exchange and communication. The two men are mirror images in physicality and posture, as they turn in profile to look eye to eye with hands outstretched to give and receive. The Turk wears the brighter, more exotic uniform, complete with red slippers bearing the Ottoman crescent and star motif, but he also appears dignified. In Meggendorfer’s illustrated racial hierarchy, the Turk “ranks” high—just after supposedly “European” races. Moreover, Germany had no designs on Ottoman territory in the age of so-called new imperialism; the Turk was neither a current nor potential colonial subject and thus seems to be afforded greater dignity. Gute Bekannte offers additional examples of some “others” to whom Meggendorfer turned time and again. One image shows a behind-the-scenes collection of circus performers as described in a 98 A.M. BRIAN four-line poem below the non-movable illustration. The white “circus man” stands in the middle with his feet apart and his arms crossed over his chest, surveying and dominating the scene in an acrobatic uniform. The horse, ape, “Moor,” and parrot—namedinthatorderin the poem—flank him, along with a young female trainer and other circus paraphernalia. The circus and menagerie were popular themes for Meggendorfer (see e.g. Internationaler Circus and Im Circus), and the figure of an African man repeats many times in his illustrations of them. Imperialism and racism fueled European leisure and consumption, and Meggendorfer found the connection useful. Meggendorfer’s black “circus man” always wears a fez, bright clothes, and gold earrings, evidence of a caricature, and he occupies decorative backgrounds and lowly positions, serving large circus animals like elephants and camels in Immer Lustig! and Nimm mich mit!, and even being captured as a “wild savage” in sub-Saharan Africa in Meggendorfer’s movable Kasperl in Afrika. The African occupied last place in Meggendorfer’s racial hierarchy, buttressed by widely circulated images from Germany’s sub-Saharan African colonies. Meggendorfer’s “African” thus signaled servitude and exoticism in the imperially charged atmosphere of the circus and menagerie in Europe. He was part of turn-of-the-century entertainment that included nominally educational colonial exhibits, “people shows,” and zoos. The denigration of “blackness” itself was also demonstrated in Gute Bekannte.Thefirst image in the book is of a chimney sweep—“black from head to soles”—scaring a boy. The accompanying poem emphasizes his role as a bogeyman by explaining that he summons only “bad [boys],” thus repeating popular tropes cultivated by adults and children that equated the color black with evil. In the fairy tale of Princess Rose-Petal and Her Adventures (1901), Meggendorfer fancifully depicted the frightful chimney sweep as a man made of coal.4 Here, Meggendorfer returned to the old standby: “But running she had a most terrible fright/For she met Master Sweep as black as the night./She shrieked and fled faster, he ran with a will/But help was at hand at the foot of the hill.” A fair-skinned prince saves the princess in this cloying story that combines quite a bit of text for a Meggendorfer with both non-movable black-and-white images and full-page, colorful movable illustrations. As part of their socialization, Meggendorfer’s readers/viewers received explicit messages to revile the “black” bogeyman and, therefore, blackness itself. IMAGINING THE WORLD IN BAVARIAN CHILDREN’S BOOKS ... 99

Scholars of imperialism and colonialism have shown that race and class are always intertwined. These interstices of identity are stunningly portrayed in Meggendorfer’s dandies. He treated men who attempted to act above their station with particularly biting humor. His figure of the Gigerl, or dandy, was mobilized in several books, both movable and non-movable, as the source of jokes. The term der Gigerl has been recorded as Viennese slang that emerged in the mid-1880s to describe a fashionmonger, a proud fop (der Geck or der Stutzer) (Wörterbuchnetz 2011). The father in “A Day in the Country,” with his bold-patterned suit, may serve as an example. Meggendorfer devoted an entire movable picturebook to this figure: Gigerls Freude und Leid (The Dandy’s Joy and Pain, ca. 1884), produced in English under the title Scenes in the Life of a Masher (1885). As Michelle Ann Abate (2012) has noted, Meggendorfer’s treatment of the dandy both lampooned a lower-class man’s conspicuous consumption and mocked a new feminized masculinity that disrupted prevailing notions of het- erosexuality. His own monochrome suit and dignified look in the previously mentioned self-portrait contrast sharply with the dandy’s bold prints and exaggerated expressions. He portrayed his socioeco- nomic position with self-respect; the dandy, on the other hand, was fair game for fun. Gigerls Freude und Leid was advertised as a “pearl of Meggendorfer’s art”;he“portrayed the dandy type with unerring humor” (Meggendorfer ca. 1898). The character provided good comedy, like the old doctor. In fact, in Trick or Treat (1981), the dandy and the doctor are combined in the single hapless figure of the primatologist “Doctor Sage,” whose subjects—the monkeys at London zoo—turn the tables on him, snatching away all of his examination instruments. Meggendorfer exaggerated the features of his dandies and doctors to offer a physical joke. The doctor’s eyeglasses in Immer Lustig! give him a bug-eyed appearance, while the dandy’s clothes feature clashing plaid spats, horizontally striped socks, vertically striped pants, trimmed and decorated jacket, precariously perched monocle, and shiny top hat. He not only fails to dress fashionably but also appears in physically compromising positions in Gigerls Freude und Leid, from struggling with a locked door to reaching, leg bent, across a pool table. In Aufgepaßt!, Meggendorfer featured two different dandies among other well-rehearsed types, including the professional musician and the female guitar player. Here it is clear that these figures represent not only 100 A.M. BRIAN class and gender transgressions but also racial transgressions in Meggendorfer’s world. The first dandy, labeled “Der Raucher” (The Smoker), is specifically meant to be ogled; the first line of the accompanying poem directs: “pull, my child, then look up!” (see Fig. 5.3). The Gigerl smokes a “fine weed” with a look of “pleasure on his face.” But the poem concludes with a warning that it would be bad for the child to smoke. The illustration upends the poem, however, as the man’s face is drawn into a steep pucker—one eye draws shut and the other opens wide, filling the glass of his monocle. The expression is of surprise rather than pleasure. His garish outfit almost matches the dandy from Gigerls Freude und Leid: yellow plaid coat over a white vest; red diagonally striped cravat; blue pinstriped, high-collar dress shirt; green gloves; and red beribboned straw hat. Meggendorfer exposed his spurious sophistication and perhaps emasculated him, since the masculine pastime of smoking a cigar did not visually appear to agree with him. The second dandy in Aufgepaßt! is “Der Mohr” (The Moor) (see Fig. 5.4). The accompanying poem also begins with a command to look and asks the viewer rhetorically: “Does this Moor not seem funny?” The verse directly describes the action of the movable picture, explaining that he bites into a lemon, a taste he clearly relishes. Like the cigar in the previous image, the lemon lifts and lowers to the man’s mouth by means of a pull tab. The final line is a comment by the man: “It tastes fine and is healthy!” His face actually registers pleasure with a broad, toothy grin. The fruit and the smile conform to stereotypical representations of black people, as discussed by Jan Nederveen Pieterse (1992). The Moor’s clothes are also gaudy: the predominately white three-piece suit is paired with a wide green tie, red gloves, coral cuff fasteners, and a red-and-white plaid top hat with red flower. He wears gold hoops in both ears, a common feature of Meggendorfer’s Africans. Both dandies candidly face the viewer in poses reminiscent of full- face, half-length portraits, heightening the visual irony between a traditional art form and a figure meant to be mocked. How were these figures perceived by contemporary audiences? On the one hand, Meggendorfer preserved the popular racial hierarchy that he had displayed in Nimm mich mit! For example, the background of the cigar smoker features a mowed lawn with columnar trees and a distant house; he belongs to a neat and well-tended landscape. The background of the lemon eater is covered by a dense layer of fronds; by implication, he belongs to a wild, jungle-like environment. The citrus fruit heightens the exoticness of the place. And the second man’s response to consuming the lemon is sillier, IMAGINING THE WORLD IN BAVARIAN CHILDREN’S BOOKS ... 101

Fig. 5.3 “Der Raucher,” from Lothar Meggendorfer, Aufgepaßt! Ein lustiges Bilderbuch mit beweglichen Bildern (Eßlingen: J. F. Schreiber, ca. 1900). Reproduced by kind permission of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin certainly to children’s taste buds, than the ﬁrst man’s response to smoking the cigar. Meggendorfer mocked both dandies, but there was a difference in degree, if not in kind. 102 A.M. BRIAN

Fig. 5.4 “Der Mohr,” from Lothar Meggendorfer, Aufgepaßt! Ein lustiges Bilderbuch mit beweglichen Bildern (Eßlingen: J. F. Schreiber, ca. 1900). Reproduced by kind permission of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin IMAGINING THE WORLD IN BAVARIAN CHILDREN’S BOOKS ... 103

On the other hand, an argument could be made that the images placed a white man and a black man on a similar footing. The footing was one of ridicule, of course, but the racial hierarchy is not the same as in Nimm mich mit! The dandies are not at opposite ends of a racial spectrum but are rather paired in Meggendorfer’s mockery. Meggendorfer did invoke such graphic conventions as bright-red lips and rounded head to depict the Moor, but he also included some individual characteristics, such as a finely drawn nose, messy eyebrows, and stylized beard, as well as shaded skin tones (Ciarlo 2011). The overall effect seems less caricatured; he appears to be an individual with unique features. To fully grasp this nuance, compare “Der Mohr” in Aufgepaßt! to “Der Negergigerl” in Lustiges Automaten-Theater (Merry Company, ca. 1890). This figure is, again, mocked as “elegant” and “fashionable” in his suit of competing prints, with small, repeated hearts on his shirt, cuffs, and hat. He reads Meggendorfer’s Humoristischen Monatshefte while smoking a long pipe in a café. When the tab is pulled, he lowers the paper and draws up the pipe. His visage conforms more readily to racist visual representations: his skin color is flat black, while his wide nose and large red lips dominate his face. He, too, wears gold hoops in both ears. Few, if any, physical characteristics stand out as unique. However, could Meggendorfer’s readers have viewed the “Negergigerl” as fully—even equally—human? Margaret Higonnet has argued that Meggendorfer’s dandy was an updated Harlequin figure, whose “comic instability” may have “undercut the racism” (2014, 135). Since he is reading a contemporary humor magazine and smiling, is he in on the joke? He appears at ease in a café, a space potentially shared with white men, and is partaking in the typical activities of the bourgeoisie. The humor, then, is not that he is misplaced but that he is reaching. He is poorly performing refinement, the identity of a gentleman. Since he is engaged in an intellectual activity, since he appears in on the joke, is he not less absurd than even “Der Raucher” in all his whiteness? Multiple readings of these images would have circulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Meggendorfer, in fact, seemed adept at ambiguity, as discussed above. The accompanying poems to the dandy caricatures impose certain interpretations (smoking as pleasurable and the Moor as comical), but even those readings could be undermined visually (smoking as distasteful and the Moor as cultured). Few text authors were named in Meggendorfers, as publishers used in-house writers 104 A.M. BRIAN or contracted others to compose poetic afterthoughts or provide translations. The well-known illustrator/animator received top billing in these books, and scholars have continued the trend, ignoring the uninteresting verses. Yet the images need to be considered in their textual contexts, and across multiple books and mediums, in order to grasp their representational complexity. In his treatment of the dandy, Meggendorfer portrayed a common humanity among black and white men, even if they were equal in their absurdity, similar to the Turk and the German postman in Gute Bekannte. This less stereotypical and more nuanced portrayal of blackness may be evident even in DesKindeserstesBuch.Atfirst glance, Meggendorfer reiterated a simplified visual language of race and racism. An African boy is illustrated with his head turned in profile, with undifferentiated, flat black skin tone, bright-red lips, and gold earring, emphasizing his resemblance to the lowest ranked race in Nimm mich mit! However, the boy rides a high- wheel bicycle and carries a school satchel with a personal chalkboard. A similar chalkboard is displayed by itself on a later page, suggesting that the object would be familiar to the book’s audiences. Even if the bicycle appears old-fashioned and the boy plucked from Heinrich Hoffmann’s Der Struwwelpeter (1845), the audience is guided to identify with him in his task of learning. Nevertheless, here and elsewhere Meggendorfer continued to mobilize caricatured images, perpetuating racism even as he explored it. Collectively, then, Meggendorfers depicted diverse and competing images of race, ethnicity, and nationality. The artist distinguished local nationalities and ethnicities in central Europe, but he also took a global view of human difference. It was an international perspective without internationalism, for hierarchies were maintained. The “other” was not meant to be feared or necessarily denigrated, but to be recognized and classified. Differentiations were visualized and humored. To be sure, this presentation of foreign peoples ultimately served and justified a white European hege- mony, especially as mapped by late nineteenth-century German colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia. Yet Meggendorfer used visual jokes and comedic gestures to destabilize certain class and race identities, making a complex reading/viewing experience for his audiences.

NOTES 1. A similar ﬁgure, complete with robes and long pipe, also appears in the accordion-folded Von Früh bis Spät (ca.1888), depicting life in a small town. IMAGINING THE WORLD IN BAVARIAN CHILDREN’S BOOKS ... 105

Identified as the homeowner, the figure poses smugly in a first-floor window to watch the sidewalk activities. 2. All translations into English in this chapter are my own. 3. Nimm mich mit! is the only one of Meggendorfer’s books that is paginated. 4. Princess Rose-Petal also contains illustrations of two exotically dressed and styled “Mandarins,” who greet the princess during her adventure by simply bowing. They are framed by colorful vases and a black lacquered chest of drawers, which complete the foreign setting. The princess’s visit does not move the plot forward, so the movable illustration acts as a colorful diversion. Meggendorfer simply included his stock Chinese caricature in the fairy tale, implementing Orientalist representations also found in German advertisements and discussions about the German port Kiaochow in China, which the German navy administered as a colony from 1898 to 1914 (Ciarlo 2011). There is still an element of danger, if not visual danger, as the men occupy “the Mantel-piece Park (rather dangerous ground).” Once again, Meggendorfer exposed his audience to foreigners with particular representational force.

REFERENCES

Primary Sources Horina, H. 1903. Wenn Goethe heutzutage im Weimarer Park dichten würde. Meggendorfer-Blätter, no. 627, 52. Band-No. 1, p. 6. Available online at http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/meggendorfer52/0010 (accessed October 30, 2014). Meggendorfer, L. Ca. 1880. Gute Bekannte. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: W. Nitzschke. (First edition, ca. 1879.) Meggendorfer, L. Ca. 1884. Gigerls Freude und Leid. Text by Julius Beck. Eßlingen: J. F. Schreiber. Meggendorfer, L. Ca. 1886. Immer Lustig! Ein Ziehbilderbuch. 3rd ed. Munich: Braun & Schneider. (First edition, ca. 1886.) Meggendorfer, L. Ca. 1887. Lebende Bilder. 12th ed. Munich: Braun & Schneider. (First edition, ca. 1878.) Meggendorfer, L. Ca. 1887. Nimm mich mit! Ein lehrreiches Bilderbuch. 3rd ed. Munich: Braun & Schneider. (First edition, ca. 1885.) Meggendorfer, L. Ca. 1888. Von früh bis spät. Eßlingen: J. F. Schreiber. Meggendorfer, L. Ca. 1890. Für brave Kinder: Ein Ziehbilderbuch. 10th ed. Munich: Braun & Schneider. (First edition, ca. 1884.) Meggendorfer, L. Ca. 1890. Lustiges Automaten-Theater: Ein Ziehbilderbuch. Eßlingen: J. F. Schreiber. 106 A.M. BRIAN

Meggendorfer, L. Ca. 1894. Des Kindes erstes Buch: Ein Bilderbuch. Eßlingen: J. F. Schreiber. Meggendorfer, L. Ca. 1896. Nur für brave Kinder. Eßlingen: J. F. Schreiber. Meggendorfer, L. Ca. 1898. Drehbilder-A-B-C: Ein lehrreiches Bilderbuch. Text by Ferdinand Feldigl. Eßlingen: J. F. Schreiber. Meggendorfer, L. Ca. 1900. Aufgepaßt! Ein lustiges Bilderbuch mit beweglichen Bildern. Eßlingen: J. F. Schreiber. Meggendorfer, L. Ca. 1901. Princess Rose-Petal and Her Adventures: A Moveable Toybook. London: H. Grevel & Co. Meggendorfer, L. Ca. 1903. Mr. Fatman’s Mishap at the Club Reunion. New-York Tribune, June 21, 15. Available online at http://chroniclinga merica.loc.gov (accessed October 30, 2014). Meggendorfer, L. Ca. 1981. Trick or Treat: A Reproduction of an Antique Moving Picturebook Full of Surprises. London: Ernest Benn. Meggendorfer-Blätter.1888–1944. http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/helios/ fachinfo/www/kunst/digilit/meggendorferblaetter.html (accessed October 30, 2014).

Secondary Sources Abate, M. A. 2012. When Clothes Don’t Make the Man: Sartorial Style, Conspicuous Consumption, and Class Passing. Children’s Literature Quarterly 37(1): 43–65. Applegate, C. 1990. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bahar, A. 1983. Lothar Meggendorfer and the Movable Toy Book. Hobbies (December): 57–9. Brian, A. 2014. Beasts Within and Beasts Without: Colonial Themes in Lothar Meggendorfer’s Children’s Books. German Studies Review 37(2): 253–74. Ciarlo, D. 2011. Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cocks, G., and K. H. Jarausch (eds.). 1990. German Professions, 1800–1950. New York: Oxford University Press. Higonnet, M. 2014. Orality Onto Paper and Into Action. In Intersections, Interferences, Interdisciplines: Literature with Other Arts, ed. H. Saussy and G. Gillespie, 125–38. Brussels: Lang. Hüppauf, B., and M. Umbach. 2005. Introduction: Vernacular Modernism. In Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment, ed. M. Umbach and B. Huppaüf, 1–23. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Krahé, H. 1978. Meggendorfer-Bibliographie, Marginalien. Zeitschrift für Buchkunst und Bibliophilie 70(2): 1–36. IMAGINING THE WORLD IN BAVARIAN CHILDREN’S BOOKS ... 107

Kusser, A. 2010. Cakewalking the Anarchy of Empire Around 1900. In German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, ed. V. M. Langbehn, 87– 104. New York: Routledge. Lüdtke, H. 1987. Clean Hands, Clean Books and Clean Minds: Children’s Reading Rooms in Germany. History Workshop 23: 174–82. McGurk, C. 2012. Found in the Collection: Hans Horina’s “The Bear Boys.” Ohio State University Libraries, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. http://library.osu.edu/blogs/cartoons/2012/07/17/found-in-the-collec tion-hans-horinas-the-bear-boys/(accessed August 16, 2015). Meggendorfer, L. 1975. The Publishing Archive of Lothar Meggendorfer. With an appreciation by M. Sendak. New York: Justin G. Schilder. Meggendorfer, L.. 1985. The Genius of Lothar Meggendorfer. Preface by M. Sendak; introduction by W. H. Hunt. New York: Intervisual Communications. O’Sullivan, E. 2011. The Same But Different: Ambivalent Internationalism in Early Twentieth-Century Children’s Books. Princeton University Library Chronicle 72(3): 683–712. Pieterse, J. N. 1992. White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Weinkauff, G. 1992. Kasperl, Kobold, Zäpfel Kern—lustige Figuren in der epischen Kinderliteratur. In Komik im Kinderbuch. Erscheinungsformen des Komischen in der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur, ed. H.-H. Ewers, 105–25. Weinheim: Juventa. Wörterbuchnetz. 2011. Trier Center for Digital Humanities. http://woerterbuch netz.de (accessed October 15, 2014).

Amanda M. Brian is Associate Professor of History at Coastal Carolina University, Conway, South Carolina, USA. She has served as Chair of the Department of History there since January 2015. She has published studies of German artists Lothar Meggendorfer in German Studies Review and Princeton University Library Chronicle, and Heinrich Zille in Central European History. Her work investigates connections between visual culture, particularly for and of children, and colonialism/imperialism in modern Europe. PART II

Internationalism and Tolerance CHAPTER 6

Imagining Equality: The Emergence of the Ideas of Tolerance, Universalism, and Human Rights in Danish Magazines for Children, 1750–1800

Nina Christensen

In eighteenth-century Denmark, magazines for children were published with the explicit aim of educating them to become valuable members of the bourgeoisie, useful citizens in the nation-state, and, to a certain extent, tolerant citizens of the world. Since it was then obvious that the child should be raised to become a member of a family, a patriot, and a Christian, this chapter draws attention to texts that more surprisingly address the child as a prospective tolerant member of a transnational community. The focus is on texts from one of the ﬁrst Danish magazines for children, Avis for Børn (Newspaper for Children, 1779–1782). I address the Enlightenment idea that the reading of ﬁction could and should change and develop children as individuals and as citizens. A brief description of the historical context of Danish magazines for children and their place in the international context is followed by the central focus of

N. Christensen (*) Department of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

© The Author(s) 2017 111 E. O’Sullivan, A. Immel (eds.), Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8_6 112 N. CHRISTENSEN the chapter: some remarkable texts on tolerance in Avis for Børn that reveal an interdependence between the magazine as a medium and expressions of ideas of universalism and tolerance in general.

DANISH SOCIETY AROUND 1770 The number of texts in Avis for Børn that address equality, tolerance, and possible changes in society is limited. But that they exist at all is astonishing, considering the historical context in which they were printed. The publishing of children’s magazines from 1766 to 1782 coincided with one of the most eventful and unstable periods in Danish history. The state, an absolute Lutheran monarchy, was partially ruled by an elite who wished to reform it according to Enlightenment ideas. In 1766 the young and mentally unstable Christian VII was crowned king and later that year married his cousin, the ﬁfteen-year-old English princess Caroline Matilda. To attend to the king’s fragile mental health, the German doctor Johann Friedrich Struensee became his physician in 1768. Struensee, the son of a Pietist minister, was a man of the Enlightenment, and he soon became not only the king’s trusted doctor but also a powerful statesman after the king dismissed his council of noblemen in 1770. Struensee managed to use his power and inﬂuence to create a number of reforms, including freedom of the press in 1770. He was also involved in the upbringing of Crown Prince Frederik, who was born in 1768, and a number of images show Frederik in a progressive educational scenario with a focus on “learning by experience” and physical education (Skovgaard-Petersen 1988, 71). Figure 6.1 is one of a series of images intended to illustrate the modern, Rousseau-inspired upbringing of the young crown prince (in the foreground). He is dressed in clothes that allow him to move and play, and the stairs shown were made especially for the child’s physical exercise. Images of the young boy and his friend playing with toys, furniture, and a dog with puppies propagated the ideal of a child independently exploring the world. However, such an upbringing for the heir to the throne was also seen in Danish society as neglectful, disrespectful, and even dangerous. In the meantime, Struensee and the queen began an affair, and their relationship and the birth of their daughter, combined with opposition to the speed of his reforms, led to a coup against the doctor in January 1772. He was imprisoned, put on trial, and publicly beheaded. Caroline Matilda was deported to Celle, Germany, which then belonged to the English king, and she died there in 1775 (Langen 2008, 390). It was therefore a IMAGINING EQUALITY 113

Fig. 6.1 Georg Haas, The Children’s Games of Frederik VI (1771). From C. Gether (ed.), Kronprins og menneskebarn/Kronprinz und Menschenkind (Sorø: Vestsjællands Kunstmuseum, 1988), 107. Reproduced courtesy of the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark 114 N. CHRISTENSEN dramatic period in Danish history, with occasionally violent conﬂicts over matters concerning the relationships among the monarchy, the state, and its citizens. That texts for children promoting universalistic ideas were published in this extremely volatile political environment is remarkable in itself.

DANISH CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AROUND 1770 The coronation of Christian VII coincided with the publication of what is considered to be the first children’s book written in Danish: Den danske Skoelemester (The Danish Schoolmaster, 1766–1767) (Weinreich 2006, 76). Until then the very few books published for children in Denmark were mainly religious or didactic works, such as the four editions of Melchior Mattsperger’s biblical proverbs published between 1710 and 1775 (Anon. 1775; Christensen 2010). In a period characterized by conflicts among an enlightened sector of the nobility that sought influence and reforms, a fragile absolute monarchy, and a growing bourgeoisie, the authors and publishers of children’sliterature belonged predominantly to the latter group. They were clergymen, educators, and relatively unsuccessful writers who often published in a number of genres and for different audiences (Christensen 2012,191). Prefaces show that editors needed to convince parents that publications for children were an important investment. A popular method of promotion was to print a list of the names of children who had already subscribed. In 1780,the editors of Avis for Børn printed such a list, which notably shows the names of girls, including Margarethe Prahl, who shared her surname with one of the editors, Niels Prahl (Anon. 1780). The list of subscribers reads as a kind of public notification of the children whose parents were aware of the importance of their education and enlightenment. The publication of secular texts for children was a new enterprise, the number of customers was limited, and therefore parts of Den danske Skoelemester and later periodicals were issued weekly, so that children could collect the parts and subsequently have them bound as a book. One reason for the limited number of customers was an educational system that privileged children on the basis of class, gender, and location. A boy from the upper bourgeoisie who lived in the city was much more likely to have access to education than a peasant girl from a remote part of the kingdom. Publishers of IMAGINING EQUALITY 115 magazines for children wanted to extend access to reading material, and in their publications they wrote about the right of all children to have an education. In Ungdommens Ven (The Friend of Youth, 1770), the editor printed a number of fictitious letters written, for instance, by a curious girl deprived of education who asks him to write about its importance for girls, or by a peasant boy who asks the editor to include characters of his class in the magazine (Christensen 2009, 198). All Danish children were granted the right to public education in 1814, which led to an increase in the production of children’s books (Larsen et al. 2014, 210). The limited market is reflected in the short life of children’s periodicals internationally. John Newbery’s Lilliputian Magazine (1751–1752) ran for two years (Dawson 1998;Grenby2013), and the Danish Ungdommens Ven (1770) for only one. Nine years later, the publishers of Avis for Børn (1779–1782) managed to keep it going for four years, in contrast to the almost contemporary British Juvenile Magazine (1788), which lasted only a year. Though Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s Magasin des Enfants (1756) was not a weekly, itwastranslatedintoDanishin1763–1764 and influenced Danish publishers. Christian Felix Weisse’s Der Kinderfreund: Ein Wochenblatt (1776–1782) was probably also read in Denmark. Copyright had not yet been established, and it is often impossible to find out whether a text in Avis for Børn was adapted, translated, or written originally in Danish.

THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF FICTION In the preface to Den danske Skoelemester, the editor writes that the publication was intended to help readers “become happy on earth and blissful in heaven” (Anon. 1766,A4).1 This statement reﬂects what literary scholar Tzvetan Todorov sees as one of the basic ideas of the Enlightenment: the individual is responsible for leading a meaningful and useful life in the present before a possible afterlife in heaven. According to Todorov, the pursuit of a happy life on earth gradually replaced human striving for posthumous happiness. He interprets the development of genres such as the novel and the autobiography during the eighteenth century as being related to this gradual change. In novels and autobiographies, readers were confronted with individual characters, their choices, and the consequences of these choices 116 N. CHRISTENSEN

(Todorov 2009, 9). The encounter between the real reader and a fictitious character was one way for the reader to “build” or develop their own character. Several eighteenth-century texts, for children and adults alike, revolve around a character and their acquisition of vices or virtues, fortune or misfortune. The development of secular children’s literature was closely connected to this spreading belief in the transformative potential of fiction. Matthew O. Grenby writes that “children’s fiction across the eighteenth century was understood by most adults as a reformatory genre, the child’s improve- ment to be effected through a process of comparison with the characters” (2011, 264). Writing about French children’s literature of this period, Penny Brown notes:

The ultimate goal of early children’s literature was to construct an ideal child reader who would accept the values inscribed in the text and respond in the appropriate manner. The child characters in the text are intended to mirror and serve as a role model for the real reader, and their responses are therefore carefully scripted to seduce the reader into a desire to emulate their behavior (2009, 207)

The idea that narratives could play a part in identity formation was not new. The Swedish scholar Lotta Paulin, for instance, has shown how medieval Swedish religious texts, which were also addressed to young adults, aimed to direct the reader “toward a change or development” (2012, 51).2 She describes what she terms a “narrative didactics,” in which the strongest components are the character, who serves as an example for the reader, and the Socratic dialogue, which offers the reader a path to internalize vices or virtues (43). Thus the new element in eighteenth-century texts is not the use of exemplary characters but the fact that the vices and virtues they present are those of citizens and not just of Christians. The transformational intent of children’s literature is reflected in numerous prefaces. Addressing his implied child audience directly, the editor of Den danske Skoelemester writes: “Read the book beautifully with reflection, my dear friends, and strive to become as virtuous as these four handsome disciples in the book, then I will love you very much and with more useful sheets strive to educate your hearts and improve your minds” (Anon. 1766, A5). It is significant that the education of the character is presented as a dual project: a cultivation of the IMAGINING EQUALITY 117 mind, or the child’s intellectual capacity, and a cultivation of the heart, or the sensitivity of the child. The goal is also twofold: to increase the possibility of personal happiness, and to increase the value of the citizen to the state. Addressing parents, the editor writes that children who become wise and develop good judgment are the ideal, since “we hope that exactly these will become great men of our times, who can serve the church or the state” (ibid.). The publication of magazines and books for children was not, therefore, simply a private enterprise; it was also related to contemporary thinking about the relationship between the individual and the state.

UNIVERSALISM AND TOLERANCE IN AVIS FOR BØRN Avis for Børn, as mentioned earlier, survived for four years and presented a variety of content, some of which may have been translated from foreign publications. It was published anonymously, and the articles are not signed. Each weekly issue consisted of four pages, and on the front of each edition was a woodcut of a mother reading aloud to her two sons, who sit under a tree. The newspaper or book is at the center of attention in a scene that portrays an intimate relationship not only between the mother and her sons but also between readers and texts (Fig. 6.2). The market for publications for children was still in its infancy, and the small group of children’s literature pioneers in Denmark also published novels, poems, and educational texts on geography, languages, and history for adults. Emmanuel Balling was the editor and publisher of Avis for Børn, together with two other authors and entrepreneurs of the period, Hans Holck and Niels Prahl. The three men came from families without the ﬁnancial means to allow them to study. They were ambitious, curious, and industrious, interested in literature and education, and tried to make a living by writing, translating, publishing, and taking on whatever other activities might be necessary. Avis for Børn was sold by the company Avise-Contoiret, which was owned by Hans Holck, in combination with an enterprise that also published a newspaper for adults, sold rat and mouse poison, and provided various services, such as renting out sedan chairs (Christensen 2012, 193). Balling and Holck were also engaged in various philanthropic activities—Holck, for instance, contributed to the establishment of a school for poor children. Thethreemenbelongedtoagroupofwritersandpublisherswhoin their magazines, pamphlets, novels, and poems addressed what could be 118 N. CHRISTENSEN

Fig. 6.2 Cover of Avis for Børn (Copenhagen: Avise-Contoiret, 1780). Reproduced courtesy of The Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark

called the rising, pre-enlightened lower bourgeoisie and their children. Their publications were intended to attract and retain a new audience, to educate, enlighten, and entertain, while at the same time providing a living for these industrious men. In Avis for Børn they attempted to do this by offering a heterogenous content: short didactic poems, prose, drama, cautionary tales, letters, and informative texts on anything from slavery to book production, with fact and ﬁction side by side. Of special interest are the texts relating to contemporary ideas about human rights and citizenship, and it is to these that I now turn. IMAGINING EQUALITY 119

On a general level, the ideal citizen presented in Avis for Børn is both a patriot and a person who knows that they are part of a wider community than the nation. There are articles about the relationship between the individual and society, about tolerance, equal rights, and the injustice of slavery. Throughout a number of issues, a father and a son discuss the communities to which a human being belongs. In one conversation, for example, about the origin of states and human communities, the curious child asks his father why human beings accept government. The father explains that a person cannot acquire all the things he needs on his own and therefore needs the company of others (Anon. 1779, 264). Man was not made to be alone and must therefore live in a marriage and become the head of a household. The father explains that when the number of families on earth grew, nations and states, as well as legislators, kings, and kingdoms, came into being. The son asks what a state is, and the father explains that it is created when many families have gathered under a government as a result of their need for common welfare and protection. One reason for the need for protection is that states can engage in war. In this dialogue, the child citizen is described as an individual who must form part of a family and a nation. Other texts encourage children to think of themselves as citizens of the world. The message that all men are equal is transmitted in the form of a letter that deserves to be quoted at length:

To a young lady! Who had been led to believe that she was better than other people. Young, gracious lady! Permit me to tell you: your ancestor is also mine. His name was Adam, not Mr. von Adam. Thus, every queen is your relative, but —this must not make you proud. Your lowest maid, the most ragged girl who is begging in the street, and the greasy, unclean Hottentotts are your relatives too. All men are of the same family: black and white, Jews and Greeks, Europeans and Chinese, Ethiopians and cannibals, Danish, French, Swedish, German, and all nations; day laborers, peasants, beggars as well as emperors, kings, and noblemen are all of the same stock. Consequently, my gracious lady, all men are equal. But many high and low people do not know that. (Anon. 1782a, 33)3

A more explicit encouragement of tolerance is hard to imagine. The origin of this text is not mentioned in Avis for Børn, but it is a free translation of part of Vorbereitung zur Weltgeschichte für Kinder 120 N. CHRISTENSEN

(Primer of World History for Children, 1779)bytheGermanauthor, historian, and founder of political science August Ludwig von Schlözer. There is an interesting difference between the German original and the Danish translation. The German text mentions: “die Deutschen, die Aethiopier, und die Kannibalen, wie die Franken, die Sachsen, und die Baiern; die Taglöner, die Bauren, und die Bettler, wie die Welfen, die Habspurger, und die Oldenburger” (quoted from Brüggemann and Ewers 1982, 1037). While the German text encourages a feeling of community among the different German regions, the Danish translator informs the child reader that “black and white, Jews and Greeks, Europeans and Chinese,” and ﬁnally “all nations” are the equals of eighteenth-century Danish children. The Danish translation therefore goes beyond regional differences and stresses the possibility of being a world citizen. The narrator gives the young lady some examples of ignorance in these matters and then tells her a fairy tale about Princess Isabella. From her windows, the princess saw children running around in the streets, dirty and in rags. In her picturebooks she saw “all kinds of hideous, wild people,” and she thought: “I must be a completely different individual to these common, coarse, stupid, and dirty people.” She says this to her lady’s maid and the maid replies: “Yes, gracious Princess!” She also says it to her hairdresser, and he replies: “Yes, gracious Princess!” But then she says it to her female tutor, who responds:

These common, filthy people down in the street are human beings just like you, Princess; and the fact that you look different and better, child, is not of your own making. So you must not be proud and boast of it at all! If you had been born among the Jameos [?], you would not be able to count to five; if you had been born among the Samoyeds, you would find the greatest pleasure in rolling around in the snow; and if you had grown up among pigs, Princess! You would, in truth, have many of their customs and would, at best, not be more than a pretty piglet! (Anon. 1782a, 35)

If, on the other hand, the tutor continues, her father had let a poor person or someone from a faraway country be raised in the same way as Isabella, that person would have become as distinguished, clever, and pretty as the princess. The story ends with the narrator stating that Princess Isabella either “could not believe it, or she would not believe it” (ibid.), but he IMAGINING EQUALITY 121 encourages the addressee of his letter, and by implication the reader, to be wiser than the princess. The idea that the poor children observed by Princess Isabella are “human beings just like you” is an early example of universalistic messages in children’s literature and expresses a variation of the universalism that constituted another important element of Enlightenment thought: tolerance based on equality. Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued in Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommmes (Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men, 1755) that the current organization of society resulted in economic and social inequality, and Voltaire repeatedly addressed this central issue, ﬁrst and foremost in Traité sur la tolerance (A Treatise on Tolerance, 1763), written in the aftermath of the Calas Affair, in which a French Protestant had been executed because of his beliefs. The chapter “Of Universal Tolerance” begins:

It requires no great skill in argument or gift of eloquence to prove that Christians should tolerate one another. I will go further: I tell you, we ought to regard every man as our brother. What? The Turk, my brother? The Chinaman, my brother? The Jew and the Siamese as well? Yes, assuredly, for are we not all children of the same Father, and the creatures of the same God? (Voltaire 2000, 89)

The texts for children published nineteen years later in Avis for Børn resonate with Voltaire’s statement: because all human beings are created by the same God, they are all brothers and sisters, even if they have different religious beliefs or nationalities. For Voltaire, the concept of tolerance is a speciﬁcally Christian one, and he uses a description similar to Saint Paul’s: in a human community there is “neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (King James Bible, Galatians 3:28; see also Colossians 3:11). The mention of “Jew and Greek” in Avis for Børn in 1782 may have come from this source, thus blending elements from religious texts and secular Enlightenment ideas.

THE CRUELTY OF SLAVERY EXPLAINED TO CHILDREN Tolerance features in a number of different texts about slavery in Avis for Børn. Around 1770, ships were transporting slaves from Christiansborg, a Danish colony in West Africa, to sugar plantations 122 N. CHRISTENSEN in the Danish West Indies (the islands of Saint John, Saint Thomas, andSaintCroix),afterwhichtheyreturnedtoDenmarkwithsugar, tobacco, and mahogany. In Copenhagen, the ships took on weapons and alcohol, and sailed once more to Christiansborg to continue the triangular trade. The Danish Atlantic slave trade was made illegal in 1792, but slavery was not abolished in the Danish West Indies until 1848. In his description of the historical context of the prohibition of the slave trade, historian Erik Gøbel writes that the Danish public debate about slavery was limited and that critical voices were rare (2008, 19). It is therefore all the more remarkable to find several critical texts about this matter in Avis for Børn, which could reflect the great influence of German sources (Christensen 2014). In the text on tolerance translated from von Schlözer, quoted above, the narrator also ridicules people who think that slaves are not their equals: “In Jamaica there are said to be wives of merchants who have arrived from England who will not believe that their black female slaves are human beings, just like themselves. How stupid these women are!” (Anon. 1782a,34).Avis for Børn also includes a number of articles translated from Kleine Kinderbibliothek (1778–1784), edited by German author and educator Joachim Heinrich Campe, in which the slave trade is strongly condemned. The translation of one of Campe’s texts describes how slaves are sold, transported to the United States, and forced to work and live in appallingly inhuman conditions. The fictitious father explains: “In order to justify this outrageous cruelty the white men have spread the prejudice that blacks are not like other human beings: one cannot achieve anything with them by means of reason: They possess neither inclination nor emotion; thus, they must be treated like beasts” (Anon. 1782b,157;Campe1815). The father leaves neither his son nor the reader in any doubt that it is a terrible mistake to think and act in this way. Slavery is inhuman, he says; black people are our brothers and sisters, and some rulers and societies have acknowledged this truth. The Quakers in Pennsylvania have abandoned slavery, for example, and even the queen of Portugal decided that the children of slaves must be free. He concludes:

Thus there is already one injustice less in the world! Rejoice young readers, that you might live to see the day when all oppression in several countries will end; and when you are grown and may become men of inﬂuence, oh, then do what you can to expedite the dawn of these happy days! (166) IMAGINING EQUALITY 123

The child reader is thus openly encouraged not only to regard black people as fellow citizens but also to work actively to help them obtain equal rights.

A “REFORMATORY” MEDIUM IN THE WIDEST SENSE OF THE WORD? When reading such texts, one cannot help but ask whether the editors of periodicals saw themselves as reformers with regard to the character formation not only of children but also of society. Just seven years after von Schlözer’s text and the one from Campe’s Kleine Kinderbibliothek were published in Avis for Børn, the idea of equal rights led to the French Revolution. Were the editors encouraging children to question the organization of the state? To answer that question, a few words must be said about von Schlözer, author of the most explicit text on tolerance and universalism, and his use of the magazine as a medium. According to the political scientist John Christian Laursen, von Schlözer was very interested in the ideas behind the French Revolution and was a firm believer in the relationship between education and human rights. A private teacher who went on to become a professor of history, politics, and law at Göttingen University, he edited two periodicals between 1775 and 1793. According to Laursen, both von Schlözer and his contemporary, Immanuel Kant, saw the press and the possibility of enlightened debate as “an alternative to a French revolution in Germany” (1991, 35). Von Schlözer was proud to have been the first to publish the French declaration of human rights in a German magazine in 1789. However, he became disillusioned with developments in France and expressed the belief that to obtain equal rights, human beings must be able to read and write. Laursen observes that “Schlözer’s elitism was only an elitism of literacy, not of birth, rank, or sex” (36). Universalism, in his sense, did not mean that all men were equal, but that they had the capacity to be equals if they were given the opportunity to have an education and could thereby “deserve” equal rights. The number of texts in Avis for Børn that address equality, tolerance, and possible changes in society is limited. But the fact that they are there at all is striking, considering the historical context in which they were published. A possible explanation could be that magazines for children 124 N. CHRISTENSEN functioned as a kind of laboratory or experimental forum. The editors may have been unsure of what types of text they should publish, what tone to use, or what issues to write about, which resulted in magazines with a highly heterogeneous content, not only in relation to political issues. They blend fact and fiction and mix poetry, letters, dialogue, plays, philosophi- cal texts, riddles, and religious texts, thus presenting the child reader with different interpretations of the ideal citizen.

CONCLUSION The interplay between the formation of the individual and the formation of society is based on the idea that human beings are involved in three basic relationships: “the relationship of human beings to themselves, to society and to the world. Enlightenment and education are related not only to an individual, but also to a cultural, social, and/or political community and to humanity as a whole” (Korsgaard 2004, 124). This three- fold perspective is reﬂected in late eighteenth-century texts for children. Magazines were published to educate the hearts and minds of children, so that they could become happy members of a family, socially well integrated into bourgeois society, and useful citizens of the state. The “ideal citizen” managed to navigate among his or her relationships with relatives, friends, and fellow citizens, and he or she was a good Christian, a good patriot, and a loyal subject of the throne. Furthermore, children were encouraged to become tolerant members of a multiethnic and multireli- gious transnational community, as we would put it today. These different roles are not presented as mutually exclusive, and the promotion of equal rights cannot be read as an attempt to question the existing order. Instead, these ideas must be seen in light of the fact that the periodical as a medium enabled the expression and coexistence of different views—not only about literature, but also about citizenship. Magazines were a tolerant medium. The heterogeneous character of magazines for children in the second half of the eighteenth century also highlights a development in the view of children as readers. Research on different aspects of eighteenth- century children’s literature has shown that the perception that it consisted exclusively of dull, authoritarian, dogmatic texts must be revised. In Avis for Børn and other Danish publications during this era, children are addressed as individuals who engage in dialogue with adults, who are able to discuss and reﬂect, and who have a sense of both humor and irony. Consequently, the Danish texts are in line with IMAGINING EQUALITY 125 contemporary tendencies in French and British children’s literature (Brown 2009;Immel2009). That children were regarded as miniature adults has been seen as a defect of eighteenth-century children’sliterature. In the historical context of Avis for Børn, however, it is a positive attitude. Readers are shown that they should not categorize or evaluate people on the basis of their wealth, gender, race, religious belief, or age; whether a child or an adult was educated or not was much more important. Reading texts on tolerance was one way to become an enlightened citizen.

NOTES 1. Den danske Skoelemester was published anonymously, but the tone and content, when compared with other publications by the vicar Bendix Krøll, suggest that he may have been the author and editor. Torben Weinreich mentions Johan Christian Schønheyder as another possible author. See Christensen (2012, 156); Weinreich (2006, 76). 2. All translations into English in this chapter are my own. 3. The quotation is translated into English from the Danish translation of August Ludwig von Schlözer’s Vorbereitung zur Weltgeschichte für Kinder (1779).

REFERENCES

Primary Sources Anon. 1766–1767. Den danske Skoelemester 1–2. Copenhagen: Heiden. Anon. [Felix Krøll]. 1770. Ungdommens Ven. Copenhagen: no publisher. Anon. [Melchior Mattsperger]. 1775. CCLLII udvalde og med 800 Billeder udlagde Bibelske Hoved-Sprog. Copenhagen: Nicolaus Møller. Anon. 1779. Samtale imellem en Fader og hans Søn, om de menneskelige Selskabers og Staters Oprindelse. Avis for Børn 32: 264 and 33: 271. Copenhagen: Avise-Contoiret. Anon. [Emmanuel Balling]. 1779–1782. Avis for Børn. Copenhagen: Avise-Contoiret. Anon. 1780. Alphabethisk Fortegnelse paa de unge Subskribentere for Børne-Avisen, som i dette Aar ere tilkomne. Avis for Børn 52: n.p. Copenhagen: Avise-Contoiret. Anon. 1782a. Korrespondence. Avis for Børn 5: 33–5. Copenhagen: Avise-Contoiret. Anon. 1782b. Nogle Efterretninger om Negerslaverne i Guinea, om om deres Tilstand paa Europæernes amerikanske Colonier. Avis for Børn 20: 153–60 and 21: 161–7. Copenhagen: Avise-Contoiret. 126 N. CHRISTENSEN

Campe, Joachim Heinrich. 1815. Einige Nachrichten von den Negersklaven in Guinea. In Kleine Kinderbibliothek, ed. Fünftes Bändchen. Elfte Rechmäβige Ausgabe, 189–99. Braunschweig: Schulbuchhandlung. Voltaire. 2000. Treatise on Tolerance. Orig. pub. 1763. Trans. B. Masters and S. Harvey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. von Schlözer, A. L. 1779. Vorbereitung zur Weltgeschichte für Kinder. Göttingen: Vanderhoek.

Secondary Sources Brown, P. 2009. Dialogue as a Pedagogical Tool in Eighteenth-Century French Children’s Literature. The Lion and the Unicorn 33(2): 202–18. Brüggemann, T., and H.-H. Ewers (eds). 1982. Handbuch zur Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: Von 1750 bis 1800. Stuttgart: Metzler. Christensen, N. 2009. Lust for Reading and Thirst for Knowledge: Fictive Letters in a Danish Children’s Magazine of 1770. The Lion and the Unicorn 33(2): 189–201. Christensen, N. 2010. How to Make Sense: Reflections on the Influence of Eighteenth Century Picturebooks on Picturebooks of Today. In New Directions in Picturebook Research, ed. T. Colomer, B. Kümmerling- Meibauer, and S. Díaz, 55–67. London: Routledge. Christensen, N. 2012. Videbegær: Oplysning, børnelitteratur, dannelse. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Christensen, N. 2014. Imported Enlightenment: The Influence of German 18th-Century Children’s Literature in Denmark. In Kinder- und Jugendliteraturforschung international, ed. G. von Glasenapp, U. Dettmar, und B. Dolle-Weinkauf, 63–75. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Dawson, J. 1998. Trade and Plumb-Cake in Lilliput: The Origins of Juvenile Consumerism and Early English Children’s Periodicals. Children’s Literature in Education 29(4): 175–97. Gether, C. (ed.). 1988. Kronprins og menneskebarn/Kronprinz und Menschenkind. Sorø: Vestsjællands Kunstmuseum. Gøbel, E. 2008. Det danske slavehandelsforbud 1792: Studier og kilder til forhistor- ien, forordningen og følgerne. Odense: Odense Universietsforlag. Grenby, M. O. 2011. The Child Reader 1700–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grenby, M. O. (ed.). 2013. Little Goody Two-Shoes and Other Stories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Immel, A. 2009. The Didacticism That Laughs: John Newbery´s Entertaining Little Books and William Hogarth’s Pictured Morals. The Lion and the Unicorn 33(2): 146–66. King James Bible. www.kingjamesbibleonline.org (accessed October 9, 2015). IMAGINING EQUALITY 127

Korsgaard, O. 2004. Kampen om folket: Et dannelsesperspektiv på dansk historie gennem 500 år. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Langen, U. 2008. Den afmægtige: En biograﬁ om Christian d. 7. Copenhagen: Jyllands-Postens Forlag. Larsen, C., E. Nørr, and P. Sonne. 2014. Da skolen tog form 1780–1850: Dansk Skolehistorie. Vol. 2. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Laursen, J. C. 1991. Kant and Schlözer on the French Revolution and the Rights of Man in the Context of Publicity. In Revolution and Enlightenment in Europe, ed. T. O’Hagan, 30−40. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Paulin, L. 2012. Den didaktiska ﬁktionen: Konstruktionen av förebilder ur ett barn- och ungdomslitterärt perspektiv 1400–1750. Stockholm: Stockholm Universitet. Skovgaard-Petersen, V. 1988. Ideer bag idyllen: Brudstykker af en opdragelse. In Kronprins og menneskebarn/Kronprinz und Menschenkind, ed. C. Gether, 65–74. Sorø: Vestsjællands Kunstmuseum. Todorov, T. 2009. In Defence of the Englightenment. Trans. G. Walker. London: Atlantic Books. Weinreich, T. 2006. Historien om børnelitteratur: Dansk børnelitteratur gennem 400 år. Copenhagen: Branner & Korch.

Nina Christensen is Associate Professor and Head of the Centre for Children’s Literature and Media at Aarhus University, Denmark. She writes and lectures on visual texts, children’s literature, and concepts of childhood, the history of children’s literature, and children’s texts in an intermedial perspective. She is the author of three books and coedits the series “Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition” (John Benjamins). She is currently one of three researchers in the project “Children and books—enterprises and encounters. Studies in the production, uses and experiences of books for children in Denmark 1790–1850” funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research. CHAPTER 7

An Anthropologist Shows Girls a World of Difference: Louis-François Jauffret’s Géographie dramatique

Cynthia J. Koepp

If one happens to know the name Louis-François Jauffret today, it is probably as one of the experts in deaf-mute children who brought Victor, the wild child of Aveyron, to Paris in 1800 (Chappey 2002, 98–105).1 He is also remembered as the co-founder of the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme (Society of Observers of Man), the first scholarly organization to define and practice anthropology (Stocking 1964,130–54). In fact, Jauffret (1770–1840) was also a scientist, a lawyer, and a journalist fascinated by geography and the effects of environment on human beings. His principal focus—and expressed life’swork—was the scientific study of children, their development and socialization, and the connections between childhood and adult identity (Benzaquèn 2004,34–57). Yet, despite his training, accomplishments, and encouragement from many Parisian intel- lectuals, Jauffret continually put off his scholarly pursuits and instead directed his energies into writing dozens of children’s books

C.J. Koepp (*) Wells College, Aurora, New York, USA

© The Author(s) 2017 129 E. O’Sullivan, A. Immel (eds.), Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8_7 130 C.J. KOEPP

(Chappey 2002,89–98). Some scholars have explored his scientific side, but most have ignored his vast production of successful books for juveniles.2 Given his combined interests in anthropology, geography, and human development, Jauffret offers an unparalleled example of an Enlightenment author attempting to introduce children to the complexities of world cultures. Moreover, his popular reception suggests that parents and tutors shared at least some of his ideas concerning what children should know about the world in this time of immense upheaval. In many ways, Jauffret’s writings for children resemble traditional eighteenth-century conduct literature aimed at socializing young people and encouraging their moral development, much like those of his literary predecessors and contemporaries, such as Madame de Genlis and Maria Edgeworth. Yet when Jauffret writes for girls, as in his play about geography, which is the major focus of this chapter, he seems less interested in teaching proper comportment or reinforcing admired female traits such as modesty or obedience than with introducing young women to knowledge that might increase their self-confidence and foster open-mindedness toward people unlike themselves, a far more existential goal. Here I examine Jauffret’s geography texts for children to address the following questions: What kind of information about world cultures did an Enlightenment scientist think children should learn? What formats and genres did he adopt to foster effective communication with his young audience? What picture of children and childhood emerges from his texts? More specifically, what were his priorities for the education of girls? To what extent should they be aware of diversity, and why should they value it? As we shall see, respect for difference could go only so far—even for an enlightened anthropologist. Before delving too deeply too soon, however, I will first provide a brief sketch of Jauffret’s life and writings about geography.

JAUFFRET, “THE FRIEND OF CHILDREN” Born in 1780 in Orleans into a well-respected family with aristocratic ties, the young Jauffret proved to be a talented student. By age nineteen he had already earned a law degree and gained a position at the Parlement of Paris. These were the early days of the French Revolution, however, and the new government soon discredited and abolished Parlement altogether (Reboul 1869,3–5). Facing potential danger, Jauffret immediately AN ANTHROPOLOGIST SHOWS GIRLS A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE ... 131 abandoned the law and reinvented himself as a publisher, strategically demonstrating his support for the new government by putting out patriotic books and journals (Jauffret n.d., 1792–1793). Nevertheless, the violence of the French Revolution disturbed him greatly, and he soon retreated to the provinces. There he began to write for children. At age twenty-one he published Les Charmes de l’enfance et les plaisirs de l’amour maternel (The Charms of Childhood and the Pleasures of Maternal Love, 1791), a collection of idylls and lessons for mothers to share with their children. This gentle sentimental text in the style of his mentor Arnaud Berquin proved to be an astonishingly steady seller, with numerous editions in French and translations into all the major European languages—even two competing editions in Russian (Reboul 1869, 103–4). At the time, the discussion of the mother’s role in educating her children had taken center stage as members of the National Assembly worried about how to instruct the young to become virtuous citizens who would be loyal to the new state (Landes 1988, 129–38; Gelis 1990,69–77; Godineau 1990,86–91). The call went out for pedagogical works that focused on how both mothers and teachers might better instruct their pupils. Thanks to Jauffret’s early success with Les Charmes de l’enfance (and his other, more political, publications), the government eventually invited him to produce instructional texts. By the mid-1790s, Jauffret was putting out popular books and biweekly magazines for young children and adolescents (Jauffret 1796–1799).3 He also offered guides for parents concerning the stages of childhood development and suggested amusing educational activities to share with children at home (Jauffret 1798b, 1806). The small books he edited about William Tell and classic fables were wildly popular for years. A collaboration with Amar du Rivier led to the first book in French of serious gymnastic exercises for young people. All told, he wrote more than fifty books for young people and their families. In these publications he referred to himself as “the Friend of Children,” thus taking on the mantle of the celebrated Berquin, author of L’Ami des enfants (The Friend of Children) (Chappey 2002,92). One of Jauffret’s great passions as an anthropologist was geography, a field that children had evidently found distasteful for a long time, probably owing to the widespread use of Nicolas Lenglet Dufresnoy’s notoriously boring texts.4 In his own innovative books on geography, Jauffret had taken to heart the Abbé Pluche’s advice to join the study of geography with history and nature because “the lists of names of places oneaftertheotherisinfinitely tedious, and as easily forgotten as difficult 132 C.J. KOEPP to learn” (Pluche 1737,125).InhisGéographie dramatique (1807), Jauffret echoes Pluche:

Of all the studies to which children must apply themselves, none inspires more disgust than that of Geography ...the uniformity of the descriptions (of climate, products, and terrain) prevents them from distinguishing one nation from another. The series of degrees of longitude and latitude offer their minds only a tedious series of numbers of which it is impossible for them to comprehend the signiﬁcance. In short, young people reject Geography and regard its study as the most monotonous pursuit of the day. (v–vi)5

Nevertheless, Jauffret insists, it is an essential subject: “Geography is the material world that all nature inhabits and in which all historical events unfold. Without Geography, the episodes of history and the descriptions of nature are not grounded, but instead ﬂoat around in students’ heads like clouds.” (vi) Jauffret began experimenting seriously with ways of presenting geographical knowledge to children that would encourage them to develop a taste for the subject. In 1796, at the Louvre, he taught a course “both amusing and instructive” (Reboul 1869, 26) that became the basis for Les Voyages de Rolando et ses compagnons de fortune: Ouvrage proper à donner aux jeunes gens une idée de la géographie, de l’historie naturelle, du gouvernement et des antiquités de chaque région (The Travels of Rolando and His Companions of Fortune: A Work Appropriate to Give Young People an Idea of the Geography, Natural History, Government, and Antiquities of Each Region, 1800b).6 Rolando’s swashbuckling adventures entertained readers while communicating along the way an immense amount of information about people, plants, animals, and exotic places of the world. Jauffret also published the very successful (and much translated) Voyage au jardin des plants (A Visit to the Menagerie and Botanical Gardens in Paris, 1798c), a charming description of a child’s visit to the botanical garden and zoo in Paris as if the reader were there in person. To the same end, Jauffret invented acardgame,Jeu zoologique et géographique (The Zoo and Geography Game, 1798a), which taught children the names and images of exotic animals, described their habits and habitats, and located them on their respective continents. He also began a much-acclaimed multivolume project along the same lines, Zoographie des diverses régions (Zoography of Diverse Regions 1798d), of which he completed only the ﬁrst volume on animals of the AN ANTHROPOLOGIST SHOWS GIRLS A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE ... 133

Barbary Coast. It included a beautifully illustrated atlas and descriptions of animals based on the ﬁndings of the best scientists of the day (Reboul 1869, 104). In 1802, Jauffret conducted a series of promenades and staged festivals in the woods (advance registration required), experiential activities for children that offered participants both “pleasure and instruction” while making them aware of the “inﬁnite variety that reigns in the productions of nature” (Benzaquèn 2004, 45; Reboul 1869,41–2). He published accounts of these activities so that others might enjoy them vicariously (Jauffret 1803).

GEOGRAPHY FOR GIRLS To Jauffret’s mind, of even greater concern than children’s general antip- athy toward geography was the greater prevalence of that attitude among girls than among boys. The reason was simple, he observed:

Boys at least can look forward to traveling in the world, whereas girls are encouraged to limit their ambitions to the home. They are taught to desire to stay close to their mothers, and have no aspirations beyond becoming mothers themselves. No wonder they are indifferent to learning about faraway places. (1807, viii)

Yet, if women were to serve the nation as “republican mothers,” they needed enough education to be able to tutor their children effectively, especially sons, who would require a solid grounding in geography to find their place in world. But Jauffret also wanted girls to be educated for their own good, not just for the benefit of society at large. He worried that girls’ ignorance would ultimately undermine their integrity and self-confidence. Once they were women, those who knew “little about the extent of nations and the most renowned cities” would be “the object of continual scorn and ridicule.” To be sufficiently respected and informed, so as “not to stumble in society over their ignorance” and to be “spared the embarrassment” of not understanding basic facts about the world, they should study geography along the lines he envisioned (1806, x). Thus his challenge was to imagine ways to pique girls’ curiosity about the wider world. Jauffret’s solution was to write a series of entertaining dialogues or dramas about geography—genres he thought would appeal to a “girl’s natural taste for the marvelous and fantastic, for spectacle and theater” (1807, ix)—intended for use in boarding schools and for families at home. 134 C.J. KOEPP

He called the work Géographie dramatique de la jeunesse, ou Nouvelle méthode amusante pour apprendre la géographie (Theater of Geography for the Young, or An Amusing New Method by Which to Learn Geography). Of course, his method was hardly “nouvelle,” but rather another iteration within the “theater of education” tradition, a pedagogy developed by Madame de Genlis and Arnaud Berquin, among others, that uses play-acting as a means to socialize children, instill moral values, and encourage proper comportment (Brown 2008, 173–84). Children could identify with the play’s characters and watch the consequences of their antisocial behavior, gradually coming to see the wisdom of making good choices. Jauffret knew well the benefits of the “theater of education,” having already published several books on the topic for families and schools, including Nouveau théâtre de éducation pour faire suite à ceux de Madame de Genlis et de Berquin (A New Theater of Education Following Those of Madame de Genlis and Berquin, 1800a). He noted that theater “exercises the memory and inculcates virtues and the sensibilities” (1798b, viii). Yet the sensibilities he wanted to encourage were more expansive for girls than we might expect. Rather than exclusively promoting modest behavior, he seemed as interested in fostering a way of thinking that could increase a girl’s capacity for judgment by moving beyond the domestic and providing her with knowledge of the customs of people worldwide. Perhaps witnessing exchanges among diverse peoples on a grander stage could enhance a girl’s sense of possibilities. Play-acting might encourage her to entertain greater open-mindedness and appreciation for difference, as well as improve her poise, self-confidence, and ability to speak in public. Jauffret’s Géographie dramatique consists of twelve little dialogues, where characters take on roles personifying continents, countries, islands, cities, and even rivers, while the audience watches them converse in small groups. Every scene opens with two student interlocutors playing themselves and commenting on the processions approaching from across the globe. Each region takes the stage in turn. Eight to sixteen girls are needed for any given dialogue, with about twenty participating overall. Although Jauffret provides no elaborate framing device, the very first lines reveal that the setting is the hall of a European girls’ boarding school filled with students “very interested in geography,” who are waiting to see a performance by their schoolmates. All indications suggest that the fictional students are bourgeois girls, seven- to twelve-years-old, very much like Jauffret’s daughter. AN ANTHROPOLOGIST SHOWS GIRLS A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE ... 135

Without an overarching plot to keep the action interesting, the dialogue carries the burden, with the characters expressing their thoughts “in as sharp and animated conversation as the subject can bear” (1807, x). Representatives of particular countries converse infor- mally among themselves, guided to some extent by the interlocutors’ questions or reactions. The glorious and shameful moments in regional histories, the advantages distinguishing each region or place, national disputes and rivalries are all made known, expressed as often as not in entertaining ways. To accomplish his goals, Jauffret mastered the writing of “familiar conversation,” as had Madame Leprince de Beaumont, an early advocate of teaching via dialogues that integrated moral lessons with useful knowledge (Shefrin 2003, 84; Brown 2008, 104–6). Anna Letitia Barbauld and Maria Edgeworth also considered “familiar conversation” superior to traditional pedagogical methods, such as rote memorization and formal dialogues.7 In addition to making knowledge more accessible to young people, they argued, the imitation of intelligent conversation facilitated critical inquiry and reﬂection (Cohen 2009, 103–10). Unlike these predecessors, who usually included an adult in the cast, Jauffret followed Berquin’s example and had children play all the parts. No adult controlled the dialogue, guided the questions, reframed the answers, or enforced a certain level of decorum (Brown 2008, 157–9). Even better, familiar conversations between girls could get unruly, frightening, or even disruptive. Characters police themselves—or not, making it even more fun to perform or watch (174). In fact, the “sharp and animated” exchanges promised by Jauffret begin on page one. In Dialogue I, The four continents, Asia, Africa, America, and Europe, are holding up the show as they squabble about who will lead the procession onto the stage. Eventually, Asia calms everyone, and the continents enter together, holding hands (1807, 7). Once seated onstage, they immediately start competing again, just like siblings, comparing their great thinkers, remarkable ancient monuments, literary traditions, notable inventions, impressive mountain ranges, and wondrous exotic animals. Most tellingly, they argue about which continent has the most courageous, industrious, beautiful, and talented people (8–17). Clearly, Jauffret assumed that his young readers would enjoy watching lively interactions among characters who spoke as they would—interrupt- ing each other, making catty observations, expressing sympathy, surprise, or admiration. Obviously, those seemingly spontaneous conversations 136 C.J. KOEPP were carefully structured, but the easy repartee conceals the pedagogic intent. Thus Jauffret could deliver a vast amount of information about physical and cultural geography—including curious anecdotes about a ship within the skeleton of a whale excavated in Holland, poisonous plants, or Empress Anne of Russia’s 52 ft-long ice palace (29, 39, 173) —far more pleasantly than Lenglet Dufresnoy had in his geographical catechisms.

NATIONAL RIVALRIES AND REPARTEE The focus of Dialogue II is Europe, and current events such as the Napoleonic Wars become directly relevant to the action onstage.8 The scene opens with interlocutors Nadine and Alexandrine worrying about the imminent visit of the European countries: “They are constantly at war with each other. How shall we seat them to lessen the chance that they starting ﬁghting right before our eyes?” (20). Before a solution can be found, the bell rings, signaling their arrival—and the onset of hostilities. England commands center stage as soon as all take their places. She asserts her dominance even as she acknowledges the undercurrent of ﬁerce jea- lously: “Yet, thanks to Heaven and my industry, my ships today sail all the seas and in my hands, the trident of Neptune is the scepter of the World” (22). Of course, she provokes her ancient rival France, who rudely interrupts:

We are all quite aware of the immense ambition and power that you hold ...in that trident, Albion; your island wants to govern the world. You will be satisﬁed only when all the continents humiliate themselves before you. But as long as I exist, I will be your rival and will conﬁne your ambition. (22)

This is the cue for the other nations to jump in and challenge England’s omnipotence. “Invasion” is the key word. Italy reminds the group that the ancient Romans arrived in Britain during the second century, when the island was “barely civilized,” and that “vestiges of Roman roads, altars, inscriptions, and Hadrian’s wall” can still be seen everywhere (22–3). The audience also hears about early Danish and Norman invasions and those of the Saxons in the ninth and tenth centuries, who left behind a notable legacy of churches and castles (24). AN ANTHROPOLOGIST SHOWS GIRLS A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE ... 137

Next, France launches into a speech about her great rivers, impressive vineyards, annual revenues of 700 million francs, and expanding borders, thanks to recent military campaigns. (Perhaps Jauffret’s message to his French audience is that modern England, with all its might, could fall again to a foreign conqueror.) Then Italy breaks in with a warning: “Do not be fooled by the gravitas in her voice. France is light-headed; with a focus on frivolity and trivial things like hair and fashion” (26–7). When France ignores her and continues with an assertion that the French language is far richer than English, England immediately retorts, “my language is simple and very precise,” then resumes boasting about her 800 ships, 120,000 sailors, annual worldwide trade worth sixty million pounds sterling, and the great city of London, until Italy finally sneers, “Sure, sure, but look at your climate: rainy and cold; you have lots of diseases too, and winter lasts eight or nine months of the year—whereas I have lots of sunshine” (28–9). In spite of all the quarreling, Switzerland amiably observes at the end of Dialogue II that “it is clear that all countries have beauty and each of us has many things to love in our lands” (46). Yet this expression of mutual respect is at odds with other rivalries that constantly emerge. When Spain takes the floor to talk about her fine agricultural products, leather goods, and rich Arab heritage, Italy, like a class gossip, cannot resist mentioning: “But word is that your people are dirty and lazy; that your houses and barns are pitiful; and that your forests are full of bandits and brigands who intimidate travelers and sometimes even assassinate them” (35–6). Before Spain can respond, Turkey seizes the moment to recount her glorious past. Immediately, things take another ugly turn. Italy interjects:

You would be amiable, but you do not practice the same religion as we do. And your Mohammedans treat other people like dogs. I say to you that someday those dogs whom you have bitten more than once will bite you so hard, and will howl so hauntingly that they will drive you back to Asia. (38–9)

This hostility toward Islamic beliefs resurfaces in Dialogue III, when Turkey resumes bragging about her lovely weather and greatest achievements, such as her eleventh-century conquest of Persia. Finally, Persia intervenes:

I have sat quietly while you have related the least happy epoch of my history, but now I get to talk to this large and respectable assembly. It is true, 138 C.J. KOEPP

Turkey, you do have an excellent climate, but you also have an evil that spreads terror: the Plague. And what is worse, you do nothing to stop its spread to all the nations on your borders. (56)

Turkey makes no apologies because it is Allah’s will:

Plague does not make me anxious. Because it is written in the Book of Destiny that we are all predestined to die at a certain day, hour, and minute. So if my hour has come, all the remedies will not cure me. And if it is not my time, then the plague and all possible maladies will do nothing to me. That’s how my people think. (57)

An exasperated Russia questions Turkey’s resignation to destiny: “This fatalism goes against common sense and against the religion of most of my people” (58). At this point, Persia turns on Russia, suggesting that the folks who live in Siberia “must be the most miserable people on the entire globe: eating rotten ﬁsh and spending all their time in those endless deserts of ice and snow” (58). Russia takes no offense, however, and simply offers a rational explanation of the connections of weather to geography, patterns of prevailing winds, chains of mountain ranges, and so on (59). In every dialogue, Jauffret creates juicy parts for all the girl actors: whether they play an imperial power or a satellite country, the conversa- tional format makes room for competing voices to challenge, to undercut, to poke fun at one another. Anyone can speak up; anything can happen. For example, the tales of past greatness from cultures in decline, such as Egypt or Peru, are reinforced by the recurring appearance of a Greek chorus that intones the message “great empires rise and fall” and “each nation has its epoch of glory and its epoch of decline” (84). These reminders about “the instability of all things human” offer one way of opening minds to the ideas that all peoples, nations, and cultures deserve respect on the basis of their achievements past and present, that difference and diversity ultimately make a richer and more interesting world. The method of informal conversation also provides Jauffret the anthropologist with an almost “natural” way to share the information he wants his audience to know—the physical description of various peoples of the world, their dress, food, language, history, religion, domestic and wild animals, raw materials, trade, and commercial enterprises—as well as the AN ANTHROPOLOGIST SHOWS GIRLS A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE ... 139 conclusions they should draw, as voiced by interlocutor Tonine at the end of Dialogue IV:

Now we know that people can live everywhere from extremely torrid climates to the glacially cold. And despite many variations in color and habits, humankind is the same species all over the globe. All peoples have languages subject to rules, they have conceptual thought, they domesticate animals, they invent and improve, they master ﬁre, they travel seas, and they measure time. Everywhere people contemplate the wonders of nature and the idea of God as a creator and protector, and an afterlife to come. (123)

Here Tonine sums up all the world’s people by afﬁrming their common humanity.

INTHEEYE OF THE BEHOLDER Often Jauffret presents difference and diversity without a hint of dis- dain or shame. For example, Dialogue III opens with interlocutor Nadine at the window, watching the arrival of the Asian nations. Each has traveled by a different means of transport—dog sled, corsair, camel, sedan chair—all together forming “an extraordinary caravan” (49). A few minutes later, when Nadine tries to arrange chairs for these guests, Cecile points out that most Asian people do not sit on chairs. Instead, we are afforded a splendid sight: heaps of colorful cushions, pillows, reed and straw mats, stools, woven rugs, and oriental carpets (50–1). We also see Jauffret employing the anthropologist’s lens to explain and rationalize exotic practices such as tattooing for his European audience. For example, the South Sea island of Coroora explains: “Thanks to our hot climate, we wear few clothes, but like you we still want to decorate our bodies” with marks of “beautiful artistry” and “great symmetry so pleasing to the eye” (197). At other times, he presents difference as something that does not have to be made appealing to European sensibilities. Dialogue VII on Australasians provides some comic relief: the New Holland tribesman totally dismisses European politesse, and the New Zealand cannibal tries to nibble on Clarice’s arm. Yet there is no escaping the perception that Australasians are somehow inferior. Interlocutor Clarice is repelled by their appearance: “They have a savage look that does not bode well; they seem cruel and malicious. Do we really have to welcome them or can we 140 C.J. KOEPP just send them back? Oh no! They are forcing the door.” Similarly, the tribesmen describe their region’s animals as “remarkable,” while denigrating their people as “small, poorly made, and disfigured.” It is telling that the Australasians depart rather abruptly, muttering: “Europeans have no interest in us” (182–5). Throughout the dialogues, the physical difference of African peoples emerges as a potentially much more disruptive topic. The exchanges bring to the surface tensions about race and beauty that cannot be smoothed over—and continually threaten to undermine otherwise positive messages of tolerance and respect for diversity. Intrigued by the question of the influence of climate on complexion, Jauffret makes sure that the African characters give long, rational explanations for their dark skin, attributing it to the sun, climate, and other environmental factors (105–9). Yet Europe’s claim to have the “most beautiful people” is upheld repeatedly, as when Tonine notices that Egyptians “have the same physiognomy as the nations of Europe, and a light brown tone that is not bad” (89). Representatives of races that do not conform to European standards of beauty, however, must endure cruel and thoughtless remarks. In Dialogue IV, interlocutor Melanie admits to Tonine that the approaching African nations, some parading in “scary ceremonial masks” and others “completely covered by long dark veils,” frighten her (86). Later, she pronounces the dark-black skin of the sub- Saharan nations “atrocious” (114). Nadine remarks to Nubia, “Your nation seems rather interesting, but I pity you for belonging to the black race,” which prompts the reply: “Happily, I am not the only nation of this race.” Nubia then lists many African states, observing that some of their peoples are even blacker than she (104). When Tonine says to the Hottentot girl’s face that all Hottentot women are “ugly,” the girl quips, “Well, our men find them beautiful and that’s enough” (113). No wonder the continent Africa apologetically declares: “I know you will only laugh if I talk about African beauty given our wooly hair and thick lips” (11). Yet, despite their differences, the Europeans and Africans continue to engage each other in conversation: Egypt talks about the annual flooding of the Nile and her impressive pyramids (90–2); Abyssinia traces her royal lineage back to King Solomon and praises her ancient capital, now in ruins (100–1); Nubia talks about her famous street market filled with marvelous goods, as well as the slave market, patron- ized primarily by Egyptian merchants (102). Then Guinea admits to AN ANTHROPOLOGIST SHOWS GIRLS A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE ... 141 the practice of kidnapping people in neighboring regions and selling them as slaves. Melanie exclaims: “Oh, the barbarians!” But Guinea answers right back: “I think the Europeans who buy them are at least as bad as those who sell” (120).9 How might Jauffret’s French audience have taken that comment?

AYOUNG READER’S RESPONSE One of my goals when studying texts from the past is to try to determine reader reception. What did readers notice or remember? How much did they understand? Elusive goals to be sure. But I feel lucky in this case because the copy I studied belonged to a young girl named Thèrese Ravier, who received Jauffret’s Géographie dramatique as a prize for win- ning first place in a piano competition. She (or some other young person) seems to have devoured this book from cover to cover. Numerous passages in the text are marked in red and black ink, with the corresponding page numbers recorded on the inside cover. Apparently, she found these sections worth remembering. In Géographie dramatique, Jauffret does not shield his young actors or audience from confronting some of the most violent occurrences of the past, even though he held sentimental views about childhood innocence. It is unclear why he thought this information essential; perhaps he felt obliged to offer more or less accurate historical accounts that did not mince words. In any case, Thèrese noticed. In Dialogue V, devoted to the Americas, for example, interlocutor Rosalie turns to the Portuguese and Spanish Americas and says: “Ido not wish to embarrass you by having you talk about the unforgettable cruelties experienced by the Mexicans and Peruvians at the hands of the Spanish. ...Instead I will ask the indigenous Americans of the North and South to tell us of their early history and their terrible suffering” (129). Once prompted, the indigenous Americans hold forth, in excruciating detail, about the “bloody and greedy hands of the European conquerors who used torture, weapons, and fire to create a theater of carnage that killed our people and drove others away” (132) and then “degraded us under the yoke of slavery so that only mere traces of our formerly great civilization remain” (132). The sorrowful description goes on for four pages, vividly recounting terrible losses inflicted on their culture by the conquistadors (132–6). Thèrese marked these four pages in red ink and also underlined in red the clause referring to “quippos,” the device of knotted strings that Incas 142 C.J. KOEPP used to record events and keep accounts: “Perhaps if the Europeans had not destroyed this interesting nation, they would eventually have perfected this admirable invention, and it would have had all the benefits of alphabetical writing” (136). She seems to have heard the voice of the anthropologist who respected cultural diversity and mourned the lost potential of a vanished indigenous civilization. This was no isolated example. Thèrese also marked the place where Russia reminds everyone that “in 1738 Japan slaughtered 37,000 Jesuits and Portuguese Christians” (71). She noted the section discussing the bloody Haitian slave rebellion, where interlocutor Rosalie blames French philosophes in the National Assembly for passing “absurd decrees” that encouraged slaves to imagine that “they could be citizens” (148–9). Thèrese underlined the passage where Indonesia laments the terrible atrocities that the Dutch carried out against her people—“even worse than what the Portuguese did in South America” (168). She signaled in red the condemnations of followers of Mohammed (64, 92). And she checked the places that mentioned slavery and slave markets (102, 120, 149). Throughout the text, Thèrese marked unsettling or cruel examples of man’s inhumanity to man,especiallythosecommittedbyEuropeans.Attheveryleast,we know that she read those disturbing accounts of enslavement, massacre, and death. Evidently, they meant more to her than the informative or amusing exchanges, or she would not have indexed them so they could always be found again. Would these passages, taken together, have undermined easy notions of tolerance and respect for diverse peoples, or would they have encouraged reflection and critical inquiry, as Edgeworth and Barbauld suggested?

GEOGRAPHY AND GLOBAL COMMERCE Another strategy for imparting a knowledge of geography, as Jauffret well knew, was to rehearse the variety of products from various regions. In every dialogue we hear about all sorts of commodities: porcelain, silk, wool, cashmere, furs, indigo, coffee, tea, coconuts, cocoa, cloves, palm oil, balsam, glass, medicinal drugs, exotic birds and animals—to name only a few. Where are these goods heading? The vast majority are intended for Europe, to be sure. We learn that the port in Panama is “never without ships ﬁlled with merchandise for sale—especially gold, silver, copper, tin, and lead” (138). There is AN ANTHROPOLOGIST SHOWS GIRLS A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE ... 143 talk of a search for a possible Northwest Passage and general agree- ment that “if this famous passage were opened one day, it would bring about an extraordinary revolution in commerce” (143). Melanie com- plains to Borneo: “you have never let Europeans establish even the smallest enterprises on your shores. ... That is too bad, since there is a lot of money to be made on your coasts” (169–70). At times, the prospect of international trade sounds almost magical—Africa, Asia, and the Americas line up as Europe’s suppliers of a glittering treasure trove of natural resources and manufactured products. Nearly every country mentions her goods for sale and exchange on a grand world stage because their fortunes depend upon trade. Nevertheless, the status of Africa and Africans in this regard seems likely to remain ambiguous for some time to come. The Hottentots claim to have “no civilization,” despite their superior hunting skills and sophisticated knowledge of poisons and drugs. Tonine suggests that, because they live at the Cape of Good Hope, “your people ought to proﬁt from being near the Europeans there who could civilize you.” The Hottentots do not reply (117). Soon a member of another South African tribe, the Cafrérie, seems mostly to agree with Tonine:

We all are ignorant; it is the unfortunate destiny of the black nations. Up until now we have lived in a kind of indifference and in a veritable state of backwardness. We are not at all civilized. We feel a profound indifference for the affairs of men, and lead lives of indolence and inaction. Our only concern is to protect our ﬂocks and provide subsistence. We hunt only to protect our herd, not to enjoy the pleasures of hunting—although we are very skilled hunters. We do not practice any agricultural arts. (119)

If hunting for pleasure and agriculture are the true signs of civilization, then the Cafrérie do not measure up and are evidently justiﬁed in being characterized so negatively. When someone asks why Africa is relatively undeveloped, the answer is “its geography.” Jauffret supplies a knowledgeable discussion about why Africa has been impenetrable: the unnavigable rivers, huge deserts, and wild animals (118). Geography, however, is not the only factor. Tonine muses:

Africa will emerge from its state of backwardness only through the efforts of a powerful European country. Be assured, the enterprise will be appropriate 144 C.J. KOEPP

for some grand nation. It offers to those with ambition a vast new theater. It would be beautiful, it seems, to render to humanity such a grand service as that of bringing this vast continent out of its current state of degradation, to procure for her the advantages that result from civilization, and to help her take her place on the globe, at the rank that reﬂects her potential importance. (122)

Back in Dialogue I, when Africa complained bitterly to Asia about its inferior status and its desire to break off all connections with Europe, Asia counseled against taking such a radical step. Asia, Africa, and the Americas should be allies because “Europe is the one among the four of us with the most needs. Never refuse Europe the goods you produce or the raw materials that are so necessary to it. ... Ally yourself with Europe and maybe Africa will flourish again” (11). We cannot ignore the dramatic language in Tonine’s passage above, with its references to a “grand nation” and a “vast new theater.” The depictions of Africa and Africans, as well as Tonine’s comments, seem to be symptomatic of a significant change noted by scholar T. C. Jacques. He argues that near the end of the eighteenth century there was a shift in the understanding of Africa, from being a land of savages to being a land of primitives: African people came to be regarded as living at an earlier, childlike stage of development, not stuck permanently in a wild state. For Jacques, this epistemological shift created a new cognitive construct of Africa that would “shape and legitimize Europe’s intervention in Africa” (1997, 214–5). In that light, some of Jauffret’s dialogues seem uncannily prescient. Subtle discourses on commerce, beauty, and race seem to be “setting the stage” for young people to ready themselves for commercial adventures and taking up “the white man’s burden.” That even books for children were laying down the case for European intervention seems to support Jacques’s argument. So, why should European children study geography? They need to understand the potential for global commerce and the faraway people involved in that trade. They need to be prepared to participate in the great civilizing mission of the nineteenth century to come. There is the promise of money and careers to be made. Yet, ultimately, what else could a girl have taken away from this play? Tolerance and respect for difference in some realms. After all, even tiny islands and nomadic tribes have their own dialogues; they all have voices that speak, argue, and advance their own opinions and sense of self. The AN ANTHROPOLOGIST SHOWS GIRLS A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE ... 145 red ink of young reader Therèse, however, suggests that violence and man’s inhumanity to man may also have made a big impression. By revealing “the instability of all things human,” perhaps Jauffret is showing his respect for girls. By giving them an unsettled vision, by not sheltering them from the cruel and tragic events of human history, he is letting them know that they live in an imperfect world and helping them prepare for it. Yes, Géographie dramatique has a Eurocentric bent. Nevertheless, Jauffret is offering the audience and the girls onstage a chance to replace ignorance with knowledge of a diverse world, to be more fully developed individuals, with some measure of tolerance and self-confidence. At least it is a step in that direction.

NOTES 1. I wish to acknowledge that this chapter is based on research supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities 2. Adriana Benzaquèn and Jean-Luc Chappey are two exceptions. 3. He named his magazines Courrier des enfants and Courrier des adolescents, thus gesturing to the legacy of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, a celebrated children’s author known in part for her publications such as Le Magasin des enfants (1757) and Le Magasin des adolescents (1760). 4. Nicolas Lenglet Dufresnoy, Géographie des enfants, ou, Méthode abrégée de la géographie,divisée par leҫons, avec la liste des cartes nécessaires aux enfants (1736). Luckier were the children who learned from dissected maps and geographical puzzles. See Shefrin (2003,89–127). 5. Jauffret actually refers to Lenglet Dufresnoy’s book by name and says that using it to teach geography to children makes as much sense as putting a grammar book in the hands of a newborn baby to teach him to speak (vii). All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated. References to Géographie dramatique will be given by page number in the text. 6. This text was quickly translated into German, English, and Spanish; new editions appeared until at least 1857. In 1804, Lucy Aiken (niece of Mrs. Barbauld) did the English translation. 7. Maria Edgeworth contributed to his book on botany, La Corbeille de ﬂeurs (1806). 8. During the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) the French Empire fought against a series of coalitions, all led by Britain. 9. In 1735, Pluche’s young Chevalier made the same comment about European buyers of slaves.See Spectacle, Vol. 3, Dial. XXII, p. 209. 146 C.J. KOEPP

REFERENCES

Primary Sources Jauffret, L.-F. n.d. Discours sur les plus beaux traits de courage, de bravoure et patriotisme des soldats de la République. Paris: Chaudé. Jauffret, L.-F. 1791. Les Charmes de l’enfance et les plaisirs de l’amour maternel. Paris: Perlet. Jauffret, L.-F. 1792–1793. Histoire impartiale de procès de Louis XVI, ci-devant Roi des Français. 2 vols. Paris: Perlet. Jauffret, L.-F. 1796–1799. Le Courrier des enfants, consacré à l’instruction de la jeunesse, faisant suite à l’Ami des enfants, de Berquin. 17 vols. Paris: Bureau du journal. Jauffret, L.-F. 1798a [An VII]. Jeu zoologique et géographique, Destiné à l’amusement et à l’instruction de la jeunesse. Paris: Martinet. Jauffret, L.-F. 1798b [An VII]. Petit théâtre des familles, drames à usage de la jeunesse. Paris: Gide. Jauffret, L.-F. 1798c. Voyage au jardin des plants. Paris: Guillaume. Jauffret, L.-F. 1798d. Zoographie des diverse régions: De la Barbarie. Vol. 1. Accompanied by an atlas. Paris: Crapelet. Jauffret, L.-F. 1800a. Nouveau théâtre de éducation pour faire suite à ceux de Madame de Genlis et de Berquin. London: n.p. Jauffret, L.-F. 1800b. Les Voyages de Rolando et ses compagnons de fortune: Ouvrage proper à donner aux jeunes gens une idée de la géographie, de l’historie naturelle, du gouvernement et des antiquités de chaque région. Paris: Le Clère. Jauffret, L.-F. 1803. Promenades de Jauffret à la campagne, faits dans le dessein de donner aux jeunes gens une idée du bonheur qui peut résulter pour l’homme de l’étude de lui-meme et de la contemplation de la nature. Paris: Demoraine et Lenormant. Jauffret, L.-F. 1806. La Corbeille de ﬂeurs et de fruit. Paris: Perlet. Jauffret, L.-F. 1807. Géographie dramatique de la jeunesse, ou nouvelle methode amusante pour apprendre la géographie, mise en dialogue et en scènes propres à être representés dans les pensionnats et dans les familles. Paris: Maumus. Pluche, N. 1737. Le Spectacle de la nature, ou Entretiens sur les particularités de l’histoire naturelle. Vol. 6. Paris: Estienne & Fils.

Secondary Sources Benzaquèn, A. S. 2004. Childhood, Identity and Human Science in the Enlightenment. History Workshop Journal 57: 34–57. Brown, P. 2008. A Critical History of French Children’s Literature. Vol. 1. New York: Routledge. AN ANTHROPOLOGIST SHOWS GIRLS A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE ... 147

Chappey, J. L. 2002. La Société des Observateurs de l’homme (1799–1804: Des anthropologues au temps de Bonaparte). Paris: Société des études robespierristes. Cohen, M. 2009. “Familiar Conversation”: The Role of the “Familiar Format.” In Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain, ed. M. Hilton and J. Shefrin, 99–116. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Gelis, J. 1990. L’Enfant et l’évolution de la conception de la view sous la Révolution. In L’Enfant, la famillle et la Révolution française, ed. M.-F. Levy, 69–77. Paris: Olivier Orban. Godineau, D. 1990. Fonction maternelle et engagement révolutionnaire feminine. In L’Enfant, la famille et la Révolution française, ed. M.-F. Levy, 85–103. Paris: Olivier Orban. Jacques, T. C. 1997. From Savages and Barbarians to Primitives: Africa, Social Typologies, and History in Eighteenth-Century French Philosophy. History and Theory 36: 190–215. Landes, J. B. 1988. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Reboul, R.-M. 1869. Louis-François Jauffret: Sa vie et ses oeuvres. Paris: Makaire. Shefrin, J. 2003. Such Constant Affectionate Care: Lady Charlotte Finch, Royal Governess, & the Children of George III. Los Angeles: Cotsen Occasional Press. Stocking, G. 1964. French Anthropology in 1800. Isis 55: 134–50.

Cynthia J. Koepp is Professor of History and Chair of the Arts and Humanities Division at Wells College, Aurora, New York, USA. A specialist in early modern European cultural and intellectual history, she co-edited (with Steven Kaplan) Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice (1986) and has published articles on eighteenth-century political economy, artisans, Diderot’s Encyclopédie, and the Spectacle de la nature by the Abbé Pluche. Her current research focuses on pedagogy and the popular Enlightenment. CHAPTER 8

Information or Exoticization? Constructing Religious Difference in Children’s Information Books

Gabriele von Glasenapp

Cultural, intercultural, and transcultural transfer processes and their various medial manifestations in children’s literature have been a prominent focus of children’s literature research, both in Germany and internationally, for the past twenty years. This chapter addresses a relatively small aspect of this large field, one that has not yet attracted significant imagological research: the images of the self and of the corresponding other generated in the branch of children’s literature conventionally categorized as “religious.” From the Early Modern period to the present day, religion, as viewed from the ingroup perspective, has been a major topic both in children’s literature itself and in the scholarly studies devoted to it.1 However, the overwhelming majority of these studies tend to address children’s literature from the perspective of historiography,2 comparative religion,3 or education—in the latter case, specifically of religious education, with a strong, if unsurprising, focus on the practical transmission of

Translated from German by Michael Loughridge

G. von Glasenapp (*) University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

© The Author(s) 2017 149 E. O’Sullivan, A. Immel (eds.), Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8_8 150 G. VON GLASENAPP religious ideology.4 This chapter takes a different approach, treating images of religious life in children’s literature, in whatever form they may appear, as exclusively cultural phenomena, and aims solely to identify their aesthetic and imagological potential.5 First, some remarks about the corpus. Although religious literature in all its manifestations is one of oldest genres of children’s literature, Iconfine myself here, for reasons of space, to contemporary works— that is, books published in Germany (both written in German or translated from other languages) during the past twenty years. One important reason for this limitation is that in the early 1990s, religious children’s literature published in Germany underwent a major paradigm shift on three levels. First, a general increase in the volume of religious children’s literature took place. The electronic catalogue of the Institut für Jugendbuchforschung in Frankfurt, which claims to register every children’s book published in Germany, has more than 1,800 titles listed under the keyword “Religion” published between 1992 and 2013.6 An important factor contributing to this sudden surge was doubtlessly the reunification of Germany in 1990, which theoretically increased the market for books by some seventeen million new East German readers. Their interest in religion in the broadest sense of the term has to do with the fact that nothing at all was taught about religion in the former German Democratic Republic, and also with the fact that the Protestant Church specifically played a central role within the East German civil rights movement. Another influential factor was a shift within the broad genre of religious children’s literature. Previously it had consisted primarily of such traditional subgenres as prayer books, catechisms, and tales.7 But figures from the early 1990s onward show, in addition to the traditional forms, a significant increase—a predominance even—of information books, some of them narrative non-fiction and many of them picturebooks.8 This shift within the genre was accompanied by a no less marked new emphasis in terms of content and address. Whereas most religious children’s literature appearing in Germany up to the early 1980s was pure target-group publishing, informing each group exclusively about its own religion and seeking to impart its laws and dogmas, the spectrum widened considerably during the 1990s. “Other” religions started to receive attention: first Judaism and Islam, the two non-Christian monotheisms, and gradually “all” religions worldwide, contemporary and past. Religious information books addressed to German children and young people became predominantly information INFORMATION OR EXOTICIZATION? CONSTRUCTING RELIGIOUS ... 151 books about religion and so bore more similarity to encyclopedias than to traditional religious books.9 Finally, the rise in popularity of these works with a primarily encyclo- pedic function coincided with the expanded use of new reprographic technology. Full-color picturebooks or lexica could now be produced with higher quality and, equally important, at a lower cost than ever before. For this reason I confine my discussion to information picturebooks and other information texts in which illustrations figure prominently, irrespective of whether they are drawings or photographs. My central thesis is that any information picturebook setting out to present the “religions of the world” will, through the relationship between its text and illustrations alone, communicate ingroup and outgroup messages, and thus cultural constructs and stereotypes. My principal aim is to examine the specificity of these cultural-religious constructs.

CONSTRUCTING DIFFERENCE ON THE PARATEXTUAL LEVEL Identification of the authorial perspective is crucial when assessing the images specific to religions or cultures evoked and communicated in information books for children. These relatively recent works, unlike those of earlier decades, use paratextual means, primarily the title, to proclaim their ostensibly global relevance.10 While all the works in question were published in Germany, not all were originally written in German. About a third are translations, mostly from British English and Dutch/Flemish, some from French. But none of them originated from any other culture, so the dominant perspective of all these books is unquestionably Christian and central European, attuned to the target German-speaking readership and— more importantly—to the views of the German mediators. These are, in turn, beholden to a concept of religion compatible with the ideals of the European Enlightenment, particularly with regard to the relationship between Christianity and other religions. Attheforefrontofthoseideals,whicharenowhereexplicitlycitedbyanyof the authors, is tolerance. What the works have to say about the concept of tolerance, usually in the form of a direct address to the readers, is that all religions have equal value and status, and should be so seen by the readers: “This book can only present a rough overview ...perhapsitwillleadtoafuller understanding of those who think differently from ourselves” (Langley 1997, 7); “Dieses Buch soll dir also helfen ...Menschen aus anderen Religionen besser zu verstehen” (This book is intended to help you ...understand more 152 G. VON GLASENAPP about people who follow other religions) (Weitz 2007, 9). Yet, while appealing to their readers’ tolerance, these texts construct a clear distinction between the readers’ own religious culture and that of “the Others.” In such contexts, Christianity, the cultural milieu in which most of the authors, mediators, and readers have grown up, does not receive prefer- ential status. Neither is it presented first, nor is the account of Christianity given more space than that of other religions. Almost all the texts merely stress that Christianity has the greatest number of followers worldwide. However, the cultural and religious superiority inherent in the idea of tolerance—only the strong can be tolerant vis-à-vis the weak—is discussed nowhere. The numerical superiority of the Christian religion as a whole—most works make no distinction among Christian denominations at this stage— is even more evident at the pictorial level. Most authors regard a world map as indispensable for depicting religion as a phenomenon of global significance; the visual representation serves to convey both its global character and its geographical specificity. The map deployed by Manfred Mai, like a host of other examples that could serve equally well, illustrates through the mechanism of geographical visualization the extent to which particular religions are assigned to specific continents, regions, and even countries (see Fig. 8.1). Along with their aptitude for conveying the geographical dominance of the Christian religions, these maps depict all religions other than Christianity as national, or even regional, phenomena. Thus, by visually representing geographical constructs and establishing them in print, these works proceed from an underlying notion that every religion is a homogeneous entity, self-contained, discrete from other religions. This presentation also subtly implies that it is possible to distinguish in a clear-cut way, by means of a binary contrast, between the ingroup’s religion (and culture) and that of Others. Intermarriage (a contaminated term in Germany) and the crossing of religious-cultural boundaries are featured only cursorily, if at all. In other words, the maps suppress, indeed negate, the true transnational, hybrid character of religions and consequently of cultures from the postcolonial and transcultural perspective pioneered in the 1990s by, among others, Homi Bhabha (1994) and Wolfgang Welsch (1999).11 Yet the works are categorical in their assertion that “[r]eligion is a defining element of culture” (Bowker 1997a,7)andthat“[t]here is no difference between religion and the rest of life. The whole of life is religious” (Langley 1997, 17): NOMTO REOIIAIN OSRCIGRELIGIOUS CONSTRUCTING EXOTICIZATION? OR INFORMATION ... 153

Fig. 8.1 Map of “Religions of the World” from Manfred Mai, Rund um die Weltreligionen: 66 Fragen und Antworten, illustrated by Rolf Bunse (Freiburg i.B.: Herder, 2008), 8–9. Reprinted by permission of Verlag Herder. 154 G. VON GLASENAPP

Religion spielt im Leben der meisten Menschen eine große Rolle. Sie bietet Orientierung und Halt, durch sie findet der Einzelne seinen Platz in einer Traditionsgemeinschaft. Religionen haben seit jeher die Kulturen der Völker entscheidend geprägt. (Religion plays an important part in most people’s lives. It offers guidance and support, and it enables individuals to find a place for themselves in a community that has tradition. Throughout human history, religions have exerted decisive influence on the cultures of different peoples; Jacoby 2004b,7)

At this point, two different authorial approaches converge: the encyclope- dist and the religious-cultural. Both are, at least tacitly, didactic in character —that is, all of the works begin with an explicit attempt to establish contact with the young reader, usually in the form of a direct address. The presentation of religions is not an end in itself, the authors maintain; rather, the aim is that the reader should gain in knowledge and insight for his or her own benefit: “Wenn du etwas über andere Religionen erfährst, erfährst du auch vieles über dich selbst” (As you learn about other religions, you will be learning a lot about yourself as well; Weitz 2007, 8). Tellingly, however, this is the only context in which any link is established between the reader’s subjectivity and the Other, since these implicitly exhortative formulations serve exclusively to stimulate the interest of the projected reader, as opposed to preparing the ground for subsequent discussion. The structure of most of these books is analogous to the geographical visualizations; the chapters are divided according to the religions to be presented. In most cases, the arrangement is chronological, with the oldest religions first, then geographical, starting with Europe and America and going on to Asia and Africa. Irrespective of whether only the five still prevailing world religions are presented (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism), or whether these are framed by the ancient and animist religions of indigenous peoples, the very fact of assigning specific chapters to these religions portrays them at the paratextual level as homogeneous and discrete entities. This paratextual structuring is reinforced at the level of content: influences exerted on specific religions by others, regardless of whether historical, geographical, or cultural in nature, are played down. This treatment applies no less to the three monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) than to the others. Christianity’s Jewish antecedents are always mentioned, and there is some cursory discussion of historical and cultural links between Judaism and Islam (we are often told that it was “once” possible for Jews INFORMATION OR EXOTICIZATION? CONSTRUCTING RELIGIOUS ... 155 to live at peace in the Islamic states), but the affinities between Islam and Christianity, for instance, are usually presented as being of minor significance only.

THE IMAGOLOGICAL POTENTIAL OF TEXT-IMAGE STRATEGIES The illustrations in religious information picturebooks play the decisive role in shaping and consolidating the image of the cultural Other and therefore the self-image. There are two reasons for this. First, as is well known, pictures have a far higher level of inherent vividness and hence greater impact than texts.12 Second, in all the books considered here, the pictures take up at least as much space as the texts, sometimes even more. What pictorial strategies are at work here? The answer to that question must be prefaced with a remark about the nature of religion in general. Common to all religions is, in the simplest terms, their genuinely spiritual nature or their relationship to ideas, the transcendent character of which is manifested, among other ways, in their invisibility to the human eye. At the same time, however, an essential feature of all religions is the attempt unceasingly throughout time and in very different ways to find appropriate visual expression for the spiritual quality specific to each particular religion. These visualizations were originally created for the single purpose of communicating with the followers of the religion concerned, who would readily understand the imagery’s symbolic content, even if living in a secular society. Precisely because the significance of a given object in an image can be appreciated only by virtue of contextual or general knowledge gained by being a member of the relevant religious community, the iconography of other religions will necessarily have a fundamentally alien quality for a beholder who is not a member. The images will require an explanation. It is here that the pragmatic communication in the information picturebooks interferes with the aesthetic strategies deployed. “Pragmatic communication” refers to the textual explanations provided for the iconography of the various “other” religions. They aim to interpret the symbolism for the European reader influenced by Christianity and thus, on a metalevel, follow the Enlightenment tradition in the terminology already quoted, to present an overview that will “lead to a fuller understanding of those who think differently from ourselves” (Langley 1997, 7). In other words, they are meant to enable the reader to integrate the Other into their horizon of understanding. Nevertheless, the pictorial level undermines this intention—sometimes 156 G. VON GLASENAPP subtly, sometimes overtly—not least because we find interference between pragmatic communication and aesthetic strategy. To make the Other/the Foreign as intelligible as possible, it has to be given a visual form so that subsequently it may be explained more efficiently. However, as is well known, pictures and texts operate with fundamentally different strategies. What appears in the text as an expression of the pragmatic approach (i.e. the explanation) may appear in the image— always from the standpoint of the Christian and European beholder—as a manifestation of the exotic, understood here as a synonym for everything that appears Other and foreign to the reader. An examination of the works considered here—in which, as already mentioned, the pictorial level tends to dominate—reveals that the non-Christian religions, despite all textual explanations, are consistently depicted, through their “props” alone, as exotic and thus “foreign.” This exoticization may be the result of the pragmatic consideration that every illustration must arouse and hold the viewer’s interest; this need in turn prompts the choice of motifs that will appear “special.” This “specialness” is, needless to say, manifested above all in the strangeness of the object depicted. A further point worth noting is that the boundary between strangeness as exotic and strangeness—from the reader’s (Christian) perspective—as threatening appears in some cases to be permeable, and it is no coincidence that most of the breaches from exotic into threatening occur in discussions of Islam. This shift is one of the features that enable these information picturebooks to mutate unobtrusively from a purportedly timeless information medium to a genuine forum for analyzing the present. Images from this scenography of the “strange” and the “other” are particularly liable to be perceived by the public at large as empirical reality. Young readers, just like their literary mediators, are aware that the book in their hands is not narrative fiction but that it tells of the real world and is not to be questioned (Steinlein 2010,38–40).13 This mode of reception is underpinned by the special circumstance that religion is, even in secular societies, a subject unlike any other and is considered to be a broad field of central importance, certainly in the context of children’s literature. This link between genre (information book) and subject (religion) serves, by implication at least, to control reception by the intended readers, persuad- ing them that textual and visual statements about religion in this specific context are to be accepted as true without any reservation whatsoever. The role of the pictures in this specific context is of considerable importance. Most of the illustrations are, if not actual photographs, INFORMATION OR EXOTICIZATION? CONSTRUCTING RELIGIOUS ... 157 artwork executed in photographic style, thus reinforcing the impression that text and image reflect reality. Another important factor is the context in which reading takes place. While books such as these sometimes feature in recreational reading, they more often serve other purposes, usually as accompanying reading for lessons in religious studies, ethics, and history. But they may also be recommended to their target audience, or simply given as presents. Taken together, these factors play a key role in reinforcing the aura of authenticity. What is illustrated and explained in these works is intended to be read as a one-to-one reproduction of reality.

CONTEXTUALIZING THE ACTORS The actors themselves—that is, the characters portrayed in religious contexts—play a vital role in these stage-managed presentations of purported authenticity or evocations of the exotic. Although the books are all directed at children, the illustrations depict at least as many adults as young people, either singly or in interaction with one another. However, the main focus here is on child and teenage figures in the books and how they are depicted. An initial point to note is that the majority of figures, adult and child alike, are male, although this fact is neither explained nor commented upon in the text. A second point is that child figures appear in religious contexts only. They are either enacting religious rituals (with or without adults) or wearing garments that identify them as followers of the religion discussed in the accompanying text. All the exoticizing principles mentioned above in connection with the external attributes of religion apply here too. A boy wearing traditional Jewish, Islamic, or Buddhist garments is bound to appear to the European and Christian observer as exotic and thus “foreign.” This principle of exoticization is applied with markedly enhanced effect in the portrayal of characters. The reason lies in the difference between a character and an object. An object—here, specifically, a religious symbol— can only ever appear in one form. In other words, a religious symbol empirically encountered or reproduced in any form is, generally speaking, always a genuinely sacred object and can never be an everyday secular object. As we know, the same is not true of people. Both in books and in reality, a person may don certain garments to mark allegiance to a religious community and may do so as a prescribed part of a sacred rite. In the books of my corpus, the actors appear almost without exception in traditional religious garb, especially when the illustrations are 158 G. VON GLASENAPP photographs. These portrayals exploit the full extent of both the color spectrum and modern reprographic techniques; in doing so, they cater to the viewing habits of the intended readership, conditioned as it is by the modern media of film, cinema, television, and Internet. By contrast, characters wearing everyday secular clothing are the exception and tend to appear in non-photographic illustrations. These are often executed in comic-strip style, an approach designed to suggest age-specific reader targeting, contemporary outlook, and down-to-earthness. Moreover, when figures do appear in secular clothing, they are conspicuously given an attribute, usually a symbol, to mark their religious allegiance (see Fig. 8.2). There are two good reasons to speak of these cases as enhanced applications of the exoticization principle. First, always portraying the characters in traditional religious garb transforms them into a religious, and thus also a cultural, stereotype. For centuries, mention of “the Turk” brought to the mind’s eye the image of a figure in baggy, brightly colored pantaloons with waistband scimitar, topped off with an outsized turban. Today, comparable stereotyping is applied to “the Jew,”“the Muslim‚” “the Buddhist,” and so on. Like the Turk before them, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists always have a particular skin color in these books, and they always wear a particular kind of clothing, which makes them easily recognizable, not least because these attributes, just like the corresponding religious symbols, differ radically from the European norm familiar to the reader. Second, religious and cultural stereotypes develop their aesthetic potential only through the contexts in which they are embedded. These are, primarily, the introductions already mentioned, which, following the convention for information texts, are always written in the present tense, thus emphasizing the enduring validity of what they proclaim:

Der gemeinsame Glauben verbindet Menschen manchmal sogar über Ländergrenzen und Kontinente hinweg. Religionen funktionieren ein bisschen so wie Verkehrsregeln. Sie sagen den Menschen, wie sie leben sollen, so dass ihr Leben gelingt. (A shared faith unites human beings even, in some cases, across national boundaries and on different continents. Religions are a bit like the rules of the road. They tell people how they should live, so that their life succeeds; Weinhold 2003, front cover)

Also relevant here are the previously mentioned world maps that set out to locate the religions geographically. Buddhists, to go by these maps, have INFORMATION OR EXOTICIZATION? CONSTRUCTING RELIGIOUS ... 159

Fig. 8.2 Illustration by Klaas Verplanke from Marita de Sterck, Glauben hat viele Namen: Die Religionen und ihre Feste, trans. Siegfried Mrotzek (München: Bertelsmann, 1997), 5. Reproduced with the artist’s permission 160 G. VON GLASENAPP brown skin, wear colorful (or, to our eyes, strange) clothes, and live on the Indian subcontinent—and only there. Analogous representations and geographical allocations are familiar from a very different context and text type: travel brochures. Book a holiday on the Indian subcontinent and you can expect to meet people there—according to most brochure covers—whose skin is brown and clothing brightly colored. Book a trip to East Africa and expect to meet black people, all clad in traditional Masai dress, complete with assegai. The illustrations in the religious information picturebooks and the images (also photographic) in the (European) travel brochures acquire a status sufﬁcient to suggest that the ﬁgures shown are not individual actors but instead represent the entire ethnic group, the culture, or the religion. They thus allow the reader to draw conclusions about the character and nature of the group as a whole.

FORMS OF CHRISTIAN SELF-AWARENESS It is one of the basic tenets of imagological research that depictions of Self and depictions of Other are intimately linked, and the same applies to depictions of the religions of the world in books addressed to children and young people. Christianty is, of course, examined alongside other faiths in all these books, although the authors rarely distinguish between different Christian denominations. Here, too, religious attributes are presented pictorially: the objects range from crosses and ecclesiastical architecture to Mass vestments and baptismal fonts. These things, however, differ from the symbols used in other religions in that, even in a secular society like Germany, in which popular knowledge of Christianity and its physically observable aspects is growing progressively weaker, they remain emblematic of what is intimately and familiarly constitutive of German identity. It is signiﬁcant, however, that for the most part these information picturebooks dispense with ﬁgural illustrations. Taking their place are often painted representations of scenes from the Old and New Testaments. Unlike the pictures illustrating non-Christian religions, however, these paintings do not purport to represent the contemporary reality of Christianity or its adherents. While the paintings generate a palpable sense of distance from the viewer, their “strangeness” is clearly contextua- lized as historical and thus ostensibly without any particular relevance to the contemporary present of readers or authors. INFORMATION OR EXOTICIZATION? CONSTRUCTING RELIGIOUS ... 161

CONCLUSION The above discussion has focused on information picturebooks for German children about the religions of the world. Information texts are commonly assumed to belong to the type of text denoted as factual: they do not narrate stories but instead purport to depict empirical reality. However, just like ﬁctional texts, they create an entire cosmos of cultural and religious stereotypes through a complex dynamism involving both pragmatic communication and the text–image relationship speciﬁc to each work. Each of the books examined here undertakes to illuminate the essential nature and structure of religions. However, this “enlightenment process” at the textual and pictorial levels is accompanied, at both levels, by an unacknowledged construction of Otherness or foreignness (from a Christian and European perspective), which evokes and perpetuates longstanding religious, cultural, and, in some cases, national stereotypes. An important factor contributing to this outcome is that the books ignore the hybrid, transcultural nature of religions; their geographical approach instead depicts religions almost entirely as self-contained homogeneous entities for an equally homogeneous body of readers. The books discussed here were all published in Germany during and after the 1990s, but it is clear that their aesthetic potential depends heavily on evoking long-familiar “foreign” traits of other religions and cultures, so demonstrating their continuing contemporary relevance. It would be a rewarding undertaking to trace the traditions of these representations by examining further text corpora, especially from past epochs, with a view to exposing these lines of tradition still more clearly.

NOTES 1. Throughout the history of research on German children’s literature, however, there has been only occasional critical scrutiny of the close link between religion and literature. The entry “Religiöses Kinder- und Jugendbuch” (Religious Children’s Literature) in Doderer’s Lexikon der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur consists solely of cross-references to entries about relevant institutions and publishing houses as well as to entries about central subgenres of religious literature, such as legends, morally improving literature, catechisms, bibles, and prayers for children (Anon. 1979, 160). Günter Lange has been inconsistent in his handling of the topic in the relevant handbooks edited by him. The ﬁrst edition (Lange 2000) had a chapter on 162 G. VON GLASENAPP

the genre of religious children’s literature (Born 2000), but in the later edition (Lange 2011) the chapter was dropped. Similarly, there is no chapter on religious children’s literature in the history of German children’s literature edited by Rainer Wild (2008). Slightly more work has been done in research on Anglophone children’s literature. The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English has an entry titled “Religious Stories” by Joseph Stanton (2001). The International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature has one titled “Contemporary Religious Writing (Ghesquière 2004), and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature has entries titled “Religious Instruction and Education” (Bigger 2006a) and “Religious Writing” (Bigger 2006b). A collection dedicated to the subject of Religion, Children’s Literature and Modernity in Western Europe 1750–2000 was published in 2005 (De Maeyer et al. 2005). However, none of these speciﬁcally addresses information picturebooks or subjects relating to illustration, nor do they examine religious children’s literature from a transcultural perspective. Moreover, although the timespan covered reaches to 2000, the majority of the contributions engage with historical rather than contemporary aspects. 2. First among these are the Handbücher zur Geschichte der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur vom Beginn des Buchdrucks bis ins Jahr 1900 (History of Children’s Literature from the Earliest Printed Books to 1900), compiled at Cologne University. The central importance of religious children’s literature in almost all periods of German history is such that more often than not it heads the list of the genres. Cf. Brüggemann and Brunken (1987, cols. 143–300); Brüggemann and Brunken (1991, cols. 59–306); Brüggemann and Ewers (1982, cols. 681–812); Brunken, Hurrelmann, and Pech (1998, cols. 171–283); see also Brunken et al. (2008, cols. 761–78). 3. Cf. Ghesquière (2004); Langenhorst (2011). 4. Cf. Zimmermann (2012). This applies also to Jewish religious children’s literature, not just to the Christian variety; cf. Völpel and Shavit (2002). 5. Although the border zones between literature, religion, and religious literature and the dynamics of the three-way interface are now recognized topics in general literature lexica (cf. Auerochs 2008; Hammer 2008), cultural studies scholarship has grappled only sporadically with the particular implications of the theme. Signiﬁcantly enough, there is no entry titled “Religion” in Handbuch Populäre Kultur (Handbook of Popular Culture) (Hügel 2003). 6. Cf. http://141.2.185.24:8060/alipac/FJTGPJDDPMIPNUWKWYAT- 00021 Religion&C2=%29&F1=ALL&A1=N&x=0&y=0 (accessed June 7, 2014). INFORMATION OR EXOTICIZATION? CONSTRUCTING RELIGIOUS ... 163

7. See Langenhorst (2011,14–7) for comprehensive specification and categorization. 8. Prominent among these were biblical legends and children’s bibles, of which a range remain on sale. See, for instance, the leaflet Empfehlenswerte Kinderbibeln (Recommended Bibles for Children), published by Evangelisches Literaturportal (Braun 2011). 9. This shift in the genre profile accompanied changes in the publishing field. The works no longer emanate solely from devotional (Christian) publishers; about two-thirds of the titles are now issued by major German mainstream publishers such as Ravensburger, Gerstenberg, and cbj. 10. Cf. e.g. Das Hausbuch der Weltreligionen (Housebook of the Religions of the World) (Schulz-Reiss 2012); The Lion Encyclopedia of World Religions (Self 2008); Rund um die Weltreligionen (About World Religions) (Mai 2008); A Faith Like Mine: A Celebration of the World’s Religions through the Eyes of Children (Buller 2005); Encyclopedia of Religion (Wilkinson and Charing 2004); Weltreligionen (Religions of the World) (Kehnscherper 1998); Die großen Religionen der Welt (The Great Religions of the World) (Barnes 2003); Die Weltreligionen (The World Religions) (Zitelmann 2009). 11. Even though pre-eminently an area in which culture and identity are closely interrelated, religion has received no special attention in any of the studies that examine children’s literature from a postcolonial perspective (cf. e.g. McGillis 2004; Bradford 2010). 12. The potent role of illustrations in the communicative impact of children’s literature has been recognized since the early Enlightenment, as evident in contemporary commentaries on Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus (1653). 13. At the same time information texts can, in the same way as fictional formats, be used as raw material for the imagination (Steinlein 2010, 39)—for instance, with regard to foreign cultures. However, studies to date unanimously maintain that for non-fiction, as opposed to fiction, this is merely a possible side effect and not the main intention (ibid.)—a stance that, in the light of the text-image strategies outlined above, seems no longer tenable.

REFERENCES

Primary Sources Barnes, T. 1999. The Kingﬁsher Book of Religions: Festivals, Ceremonies, and Beliefs from Around the World. New York: Kingﬁsher. Barnes, T. 2003. Die großen Religionen der Welt: Hinduismus, Buddhismus, Judentum, Christentum, Islam. Trans. A. Emmert. Ravensburg: Ravensburger. (Translation of Barnes 1999). 164 G. VON GLASENAPP

Bowker, J. 1997a. World Religions. London, New York: Dorling Kindersley. Bowker, J. 1997b. Religionen visuell. Trans. M. Wilhelmi. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg. (Translation of Bowker 1997a). Braun, J. (ed.). 2011. Empfehlenswerte Kinderbibeln: Themenheft. Göttingen: Evangelisches Literaturportal. Buller, L. 2005. A Faith Like Mine: A Celebration of the World’s Religions through the Eyes of Children. New York: Dorling Kindersley. Buller, L. 2006. Religionen dieser Welt. Trans. M. Zettner. Starnberg: Dorling Kindersley. (Translation of Buller 2005.) Jacoby, E. (ed). 2004a. Das visuelle Lexikon der Weltreligionen. Trans. R. Hannig. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg. (Adaptation of Wilkinson and Charing 2004.) Jacoby, E. 2004b. Einleitung. In Das visuelle Lexikon der Weltreligionen, ed. E. Jacoby, 7–8. Trans. R. Hannig. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg. Kehnscherper, J. 1998. Weltreligionen. Illus. P. Klaucke. Hamburg: Tessloff. Langley, M. 1993. World Religions. Oxford: Lion. Langley, M. 1997. Religionen: Die großen Religionen der Welt: Lehre, Mythen, Glaubenspraxis. Trans. M. Wilhelmi. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg. (Translation of Langley 1993.) Mai, M. 2008. Rund um die Weltreligionen: 66 Fragen und Antworten. Illus. R. Bunse. Freiburg i.Br.: Herder. Meyer, K. 2007. Wie ist das mit ...den Religionen. Illus. S. Reekers. Stuttgart: Gabriel. Schulz-Reiss, C. 2012. Das Hausbuch der Weltreligionen. Illus. C. Lieb. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg. Self, D. 2008. The Lion Encyclopedia of World Religions. Oxford: Lion. Self, D. 2012. Die großen Religionen der Welt auf einen Blick. Trans. I. Halbfas. Düsseldorf: Patmos. (Translation of Self 2008.) Sterck, M. de. 1997. Alle dagen feest: Godsdiensten van de wereld. Illus. K. Verplancke. Tielt: Lannoo. Sterck, M. 1997. Glauben hat viele Namen: Die Religionen und ihre Feste. Trans. S. Mrotzek. Illus. K. Verplancke. München: Bertelsmann. (Translation of Sterck 1997.) Weinhold. A. 2003. Unsere Religionen: Christentum, Islam, Hinduismus, Buddhismus, Judentum. Illus. A. Weinhold. Ravensburg: Ravensburger Buchverlag Meier. Weitz, B. 2007. Nachgefragt: Weltreligionen. Basiswissen zum Mitreden. Illus. V. Ballhaus. Bindlach: Loewe. Wilkinson, P., and D. Charing (eds). 2004. Encyclopedia of Religion. London: Dorling Kindersley. Zitelmann, A. 2009. Die Weltreligionen. Illus. S. Heußel. Weinheim, Basel: Beltz & Gelberg. INFORMATION OR EXOTICIZATION? CONSTRUCTING RELIGIOUS ... 165

Secondary Sources Anon. 1979. Religiöses Kinder- und Jugendbuch. In Lexikon der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur, vol. 3, ed. K. Doderer, 160. Weinheim, Basel: Beltz. Auerochs, B. 2008. Religion und Literatur. In Metzler Lexikon Literatur, 3rd ed., ed. D. Burdorf et al., 643–4. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler. Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. London, New York: Routledge. Bigger, S. 2006a. Religious Instruction and Education. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, vol. 3, ed. J. Zipes, 333–4. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bigger, S. 2006b. Religious Writing. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, vol. 3, ed. J. Zipes, 334–7. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Born, M. 2000. Religiöse Kinder- und Jugendliteratur. In Taschenbuch der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur, ed. G. Lange, 399–414. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Hohengehren. Bradford, C. 2010. Race, Ethnicity and Colonialism. In The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature, ed. David Rudd, 39–50. New York: Routledge. Brüggemann, T., and H.-H. Ewers (eds). 1982. Handbuch zur Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: Von 1750–1800. Stuttgart: Metzler. Brüggemann, T., and O. Brunken (eds). 1987. Handbuch zur Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: Vom Beginn des Buchdrucks bis 1570. Stuttgart: Metzler. Brüggemann, T., and O. Brunken (eds). 1991. Handbuch zur Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: Von 1570–1750. Stuttgart: Metzler. Brunken, O., B. Hurrelmann, and K.-U. Pech (eds). 1998. Handbuch zur Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: Von 1800 bis 1850. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler. Brunken, O., et al. (eds). 2008. Handbuch zur Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: Von 1850–1900. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler. De Maeyer, J., et al. (eds). 2005. Religion, Children’s Literature and Modernity in Western Europe 1750–2000. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Ghesquière, R. 2004. Contemporary Religious Writing. In International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, 2nd ed., ed. P. Hunt, 306–17. London, New York: Routledge. Hammer, A. 2008. Religion und Literatur. In Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie, 4th ed., ed. A. Nünning, 614–15.Stuttgart,Weimar: Metzler. Hügel, H.-O. (ed). 2003. Handbuch Populäre Kultur: Begriffe, Theorien und Diskussionen. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler. Lange, G. (ed). 2000. Taschenbuch der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Hohengehren. Lange, G. (ed). 2011. Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der Gegenwart: Ein Handbuch. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Hohengehren. 166 G. VON GLASENAPP

Langenhorst, G. 2011. Hinführung: Religion in der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur? Epochen und Ertrag der Forschung. In Gestatten: Gott! Religion in der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der Gegenwart, ed. G. Langenhorst, 7–24. München: Verlag Sankt Michaelsbund. McGillis, R. 2004. Postcolonialism: Originating Difference. In International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, 2nd ed., ed. P. Hunt, 891–900. London, New York: Routledge. Stanton, J. 2001. Religious Stories. In The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English, ed. V. Watson, 602–4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinlein, R. 2010. Fiktionalität und Nicht-Fiktionalität im Kinder- und Jugendsachbuch: Überlegungen zur Bestimmung eines vielgestaltigen Genres. In Sachtexte für Kinder- und Jugendliche, ed. A. Meissner, 29–44. Hannover: Wehrhahn. Völpel, A., and Z. Shavit. 2002. Deutsch-jüdische Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: Ein literaturgeschichtlicher Grundriß. In Zusammenarbeit mit Ran HaCohen. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler. Welsch, W. 1999. Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today. In City, Nation, World, ed. M. Featherstone and S. Lash, 194–213. London: Sage. Wild, R. (ed). 2008. Geschichte der deutschen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur. 3rd ed. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler. Zimmermann, M. 2012. Literatur für den Religionsunterricht: Kinder- und Jugendbücher für die Primar- und Sekundarstufe. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Gabriele von Glasenapp is Professor of German Literature and Director of the Center for Children’s and Young Adult Media Research (ALEKI) at the University of Cologne, Germany. Her research interests include the theory, history, and genres of children’s literature, Jewish children’sliteraturefrom the eighteenth to the twenty-ﬁrst centuries, European Jewish literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and cultures of remembrance, cultural memory, and popular culture, on all of which she has published widely. One of her most recent monographs is an introduction to children’sliterature studies, Kinder- und Jugendliteratur (co-authored with Gina Weinkauff [2014]). PART III

Constructing Self and Nation CHAPTER 9

Anxious Encounters: Picturing the Street Child in On the Sidewalks of New York

Lara Saguisag

On September 5, 1897, a single-panel cartoon series titled On the Sidewalks of New York debuted in the comic supplement pages of New York Journal, a newspaper published by William Randolph Hearst. On the Sidewalks was headlined by two child characters: the Boy, a street urchin who constantly devises mischievous schemes, and the well-heeled Girl, who often watches the Boy and sometimes attempts to dissuade him from carrying out his pranks. On the Sidewalks abruptly disappeared from the paper in January 1898, although it was revived a year later. Its second run lasted from January 1899 to June 1900. Most cartoon histories neglect this short-lived series, perhaps because it did not enjoy the same popularity as other titles that appeared in the last decade of the nineteenth century, such as Richard F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley and Rudolph Dirks’s The Katzenjammer Kids. The work of Outcault and Dirks (as well as that of their contemporaries Frederick Burr Opper and James Swinnerton) are often credited for establishing the elements

L. Saguisag (*) College of Staten Island, CUNY, New York City, USA

© The Author(s) 2017 169 E. O’Sullivan, A. Immel (eds.), Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8_9 170 L. SAGUISAG commonly associated with comics today, such as the use of sequential panels, recurring characters, and word balloons. On the Sidewalks, on the other hand, appears to have had no notable impact on the development of the comic strip form. However, this chapter approaches On the Sidewalks as a significant cultural artifact of the Progressive Era, for it expresses American anxieties about childhood and city life at the turn of the twentieth century. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, many Americans, primarily members of the urban, white middle class, led a variety of campaigns to institute political, social, and economic reforms in response to urbanization, industrialization, and mass immigration. A phenomenon that particularly troubled these reformers—or, as they sometimes called themselves, progressives— was the growing number of children who lived and played in the streets and slums of the cities. These so-called street urchins were deemed a symptom—and sometimes a cause—of urban ills, and reformers attempted to “save” them by demanding the implementation of mandatory public schooling and child labor laws, creating playgrounds and other “safe” play spaces, regulating children’s access to nickelodeons and other forms of mass entertainment, and campaigning for the expansion of services such as public health and sanitation. At first glance, On the Sidewalks appears to articulate contemporary fears concerning the child exposed to the “dangers” of the street. The series seems to characterize the urchin as a troublesome figure who disrupts the rhythms of city life. But, as I discuss below, the series rejects contemporary constructions of the street child as a subject to be pitied, dreaded, or controlled. Certainly, the juxtaposition of the lower-class Boy and the middle-class Girl was used to highlight class differences and maintain the latter’s moral superiority over the former. Yet On the Sidewalks also encourages readers to sympathize with and root for the Boy by suggesting that he is a relative of the popular literary figure of the Bad Boy. The Boy’s lineage can be traced to fictional characters such as Tom Bailey, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn. In appropriating the figure of the mischievous-yet-beloved country boy, On the Sidewalks implied that scrappy boys who milled in the city streets had much in common with their rural peers. On the Sidewalks hints at the Boy’s Irish heritage, but it also shows that his prankishness, like that of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s and Mark Twain’sall- American boys, is evidence of his energy and independence, qualities that were valuable in those who sought membership of a modernizing and expanding nation. Moreover, while his morals may be questionable, his ANXIOUS ENCOUNTERS: PICTURING THE STREET CHILD ... 171 actions often target “suspect” groups, such as “unassimilable” immigrants. Thus the Boy emerges not so much as an antagonistic, destructive figure but rather as a proxy through whom readers could express their anxieties. The series also frames the Boy as a pleasurable rather than a dangerous character, showing how the Girl sometimes takes amusement in his acts of mischief. The captions simultaneously reinforce and collapse the boundary between “good” and “bad” children. They are presented as mock lessons, parodying schoolchildren’s early readers. While the text, which appears to be written in the voice of a schoolteacher, instructs readers to regard the child of the street as an object to be scrutinized, it also encourages the audience to identify with this “other” child and delight in his mischief- making.

CELEBRATING THE SCRAPPY STREET CHILD Around the time when On the Sidewalks appeared, many progressives were fervently campaigning for and implementing programs designed to “rescue” children from the purportedly perilous city streets. The work of social reformer and photojournalist Jacob Riis was particularly inﬂuential in shaping many reformers’ views of street children. In How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890), Riis’s essays and photographs characterize children of the working and immigrant classes as highly vulnerable. He depicted them as pitiful beings who were often unsupervised by adults and left to wander the city barefoot, sleep in alleyways, and fall victim to vices such as drinking, smoking, and gambling. Riis believed that “the young are naturally neither vicious nor hardened, simply weak and undeveloped, except by the bad inﬂuences of the street” (2010, 105). His work helped popularize the notion that the urchin was an impotent waif whose innocence was corrupted by life on the streets. Many contemporary cartoons and comic strips, however, challenged this image of the helpless street child. In contrast they depicted urchins as scrappy and quick-witted, often possessing acuity for social commentary. Perhaps no other series celebrated the rowdy urchin more than Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley. This popular single-panel series, which ran in New York World between 1895 and 1898, focused on the boisterous activities of working-class and immigrant children. Outcault’s characters played football and baseball, held goat and dog races, staged parades, visited Central Park and Coney Island; their 172 L. SAGUISAG pastimes often dissolved into melees. Sometimes they staged diversions associated with the upper crust of New York, such as golf games, dog shows, and elaborate weddings, and in doing so they revealed and mocked the pretension, excess, and brutalities at the heart of these “civilized” events (Wood 2004). Hogan’s Alley also recorded how, at the turn of the century, children of the lower classes turned streets and other urban spaces into their playgrounds. As David Nasaw puts it:

Through sheer force of numbers, raw energy (released in a torrent after a day in the classroom), and a bit of ingenuity, they converted public space into their community playground, pushing aside the ordinary adult world of peddlers and pushcarts, policemen and delivery wagons. The intensity with which the children threw themselves into their games startled middle-class observers. But this intensity was just the outward manifestation of their capacity for putting the adult world at a distance. (1985, 21)

Such “distancing” of adults was made manifest in Outcault’s series. Children took center stage in Hogan’s Alley, with adult characters either absent or relegated to the background. The series seemed to suggest that the absence of discipline was a result of the adults’ powerlessness and the children’s incorrigibility. The purpose of Hogan’s Alley, however, was not to warn or alarm its readers about dangerous children but rather to present its characters as amusing figures who could also be admired for their ability to survive the streets. One of the recurring characters, a bald, jug-eared boy who wore a yellow nightshirt, best represents this image of the savvy, entertaining street child. The antithesis of the tired-looking, pitiful waifs in Riis’s photographs, he greeted readers with a wide grin and clever quips written on his nightshirt. Progressive Era readers were delighted by this character and christened him “The Yellow Kid.” The character is often credited for boosting sales of New York World and was key to establishing Outcault’s career and his reputation as “father of the funnies.” Numerous cartoonists sought to replicate Outcault’s success by creating their own series headlined by little vagrants. One was On the Sidewalks of New York. The authorship of the series is, unfortunately, a little difficult to establish. Most episodes of the initial run were unsigned, with the initials “L.M.G.” appearing in a few installments. The second run, however, has been credited to T. S. Allen (Holtz 2013b). At the time it was ANXIOUS ENCOUNTERS: PICTURING THE STREET CHILD ... 173 not unusual for editors and cartoonists to appropriate characters and titles created by other artists, and it is possible that Allen was assigned to resurrect the series initially drawn by the artist who identified himself as “L.M.G.” Comic strip historian Allan Holtz (2013b) suggests that Allen may have drawn the first series of episodes as well, as he was already on the staff of New York Journal when On the Sidewalks debuted. In any case, Allen appeared to be fascinated by the figure of the street urchin. In the early 1900s he became known as the “Phil May of America” as he made a career out of illustrating New York City street kids the same way the British-born May built his reputation by drawing London’s guttersnipes (Holtz 2013a).

URBAN ENCOUNTERS On the Sidewalks was clearly inspired by the success of Hogan’s Alley, but it also alluded to a well-known ditty released a few years earlier. In 1894 an Irish-born vaudeville singer named Charles Lawlor asked James W. Blake, a hat salesman who moonlighted as a lyricist, to write the words for a tune he was composing. Their collaboration resulted in “The Sidewalks of New York,” and the song became an instant success. Sheet music that featured “The Sidewalks of New York” enjoyed brisk sales, and the song was recorded widely by different artists during and beyond Lawlor’s and Blake’s lifetimes. In his lyrics, Blake attempts to preserve his memories of growing up in the East Side of Lower Manhattan, where he was born in 1862. He records the names of some of his childhood friends, such as Mamie O’Rorke, Johnny Casey, and Nellie Shannon, and describes children dancing in front of an “old brown wooden stoop/on a summer’s evening” (Lawlor and Blake 1894). The lyrics express nostalgia for a childhood spent in the city. In contrast to the notion that playing on the streets was fraught with danger, “The Sidewalks of New York” romanticizes street play, characterizing it as a harmonious activity that transforms into a graceful dance:

Boys and girls together We would sing and waltz While the “ginnie” played the organ On the sidewalks of New York. (Lawlor and Blake 1894) 174 L. SAGUISAG

These lyrics not only counter the images of bedlam in Hogan’s Alley but also hint at the possibility of cooperative play between children from different neighborhoods. Although the names in Blake’s lyrics suggest a largely Irish immigrant neighborhood, he also describes the “merry group” of boys and girls who play and dance together as coming from “East side, West side, all around the town” (Lawlor and Blake 1894). The song thus shows children crossing the lines of gender, and likely of class and ethnicity, to engage in play. In the cartoon series On the Sidewalks, two very different child characters also come together. The first is the Boy, a ragamuffinwhowears torn, oversized, and mismatched clothes and is often accompanied by a mangy dog whose leash has been fashioned out of rope. The second is theGirl,whoisimpeccablydressedinawhitehatanddress,andoften cradles a black cat that wears a red bow around its neck. The series implies that the Boy and the Girl have frequent encounters on the streets of New York as well as numerous interactions with a variety of other “urban characters,” such as buskers, policemen, and vendors. The series, like the song, acknowledges that young people are active participants in urban life. In depicting these exchanges, the series documents what Rebecca Zurier calls “a profound transformation [taking place] on the social realm of New York City at the turn of the century: “[It] was a city of strangers and extremes of wealth and poverty, and also one of encounters. Immigrants, women and other (mainly white) populations that had previously been confined to specific psychic and geographic spheres now jockeyed for greater political power and visibility in public life” (2006, 3). As Shirley J. Yee reminds us, Progressive Era New York did not consist of sets of exclusive, isolated enclaves; boundaries between neighborhoods were in fact quite porous. The urban environment “provided physical and cultural space where particular kinds of social and economic relationships took place between urban working-class women, men and children and between the middle classes and the poor, working- class, and immigrant populations” (2012, 15). So-called ethnic neighborhoods, such as the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and Little Italy, were in fact inhabited by a diverse population of “old” immigrants and new arrivals (25). On the Sidewalks represents New York as a place where familiarity between strangers could develop. Although the designations of “Boy” and “Girl” give a quality of anonymity to the two protagonists, their weekly encounters enable them to recognize one another. ANXIOUS ENCOUNTERS: PICTURING THE STREET CHILD ... 175

CONTRASTING CHILDHOODS Of course, the juxtaposition of the Boy and the Girl was also meant to highlight, rather than diminish, the contrast between two New York City childhoods. Visual markers communicate their class differences. The Boy’s tattered clothes indicate destitution, a childhood that has been “frayed” by a life of hardship. An abundance of ribbons and frills, on the other hand, signiﬁes the Girl’safﬂuence. As a member of the urban middle class, she enjoys a “protected” childhood. As Joseph Illick documents, urban middle-class parents, beginning in the eighteenth century, imagined their children as “innocent and vulnerable beings threatened by the urban environment” and sought to turn the home into a safe haven from the city’s dangers (2002, 6). The Girl’s white dress suggests that her innocence has not been “tainted” by so-called vulgar elements. Her well- groomed cat—in contrast to the Boy’s mangy dog—points to the comfort and safety provided by private, domestic spaces. Her toys, such as a doll and a hoop-and-stick, indicate a childhood that has remained intact, focused on play and kept away from the “adult” sphere of labor. The series suggests that the Boy is also a playful character, but his not- so-innocent “games” are meant to agitate the people he encounters. What is curious, though, is that he rarely carries out his pranks. He is often shown in the act of deliberation rather than action. For example, in “First Lesson” he stands still while listening to a musician play what appears to be a clarinet. The narrator, however, insists that thoughts of mischief are swirling in the Boy’s mind:

What is the Boy think-ing about? Why does he hand-le the Brick so ner-vous-ly? Don’t you know? The Boy is hes-it-a-ting whe-ther to soak the [Musician] with the Brick. (L.M.G. 1897a)

The episode hinges on the Boy’s contemplation, rather than execution, of a prank. Arguably, this focus on contemplation and the lack of slapstick are the reasons why On the Sidewalks never gained the following that Hogan’s Alley enjoyed. Readers seemed to relish Outcault’s images of children hitting one another, being chased or bitten by animals, and being flung into the air. Other contemporary strips, such as Opper’s Happy Hooligan 176 L. SAGUISAG and Dirks’s The Katzenjammer Kids, were likewise filled with what Peter Maresca describes as a “gleeful anarchy” that “came with all the humour of the zaniest comedy from the vaudeville stage” (2013, 5). The artist of On the Sidewalks, in the meantime, seemed more interested in the potential for slapstick. As such, his rendition of city life lacks the dynamism and violence that was present in contemporary strips. In On the Sidewalks, turn-of-the- century New York City is a nearly empty space in which residents are often at a standstill, primarily engaged in watching and thinking about other inhabitants. While the city in Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley is boisterous and crowded, the New York throng is banished from On the Sidewalks. Readers are invited not to witness the hustle and bustle of the city but rather to focus on a few characters, and speculate on the Boy’s motives and the possible consequences of his actions. The Girl serves to prevent the Boy’s mischievous ideas from coming to fruition. In “Fifth Lesson” (Fig. 9.1) she wags her finger at him, attempting to discourage him from performing a prank that could lead to a series

Fig. 9.1 L.M.G., “Fifth Lesson,” New York Journal, October 3, 1897. Reproduced courtesy of The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. ANXIOUS ENCOUNTERS: PICTURING THE STREET CHILD ... 177 of catastrophes. The narrator suggests that if the Boy were to tie two pieces of rope together—one attached to a ladder on which a man stands, and the other to his dog—the result would be that “the Man will fall from the lad-der; the paint will fall on the Lit-tle Girl; the Dog will sad-den the Kit-ty; the Man’s wife will faint. And the Boy will gloat” (L.M.G. 1897e). The Boy gazes upward (toward the man’s wife, who also looks at him), seemingly oblivious to the Girl’s words of caution. On the one hand, “Fifth Lesson” represents this urban encounter as an exchange of threats and warnings that results in an impasse. On the other hand, the episode alludes to how the figure of the street child inspired anxiety by simply serving as a potential menace to society. On the Sidewalks expresses how white, middle-class fears of street children were often focused on the imagined rather than the actual harmful acts they carried out (Nasaw 1985, 139–41). Some Americans who were perturbed by the image of delinquent children running amok in New York were moved to become “child- savers.” For these reformers, the child who played in the slums and streets was a figure of “pathos,” for he had been “deprived of opportunity for wholesome play” (Wald 1971, 72, 73). Child-savers came from a variety of professions and social positions, and often had different agendas (Mintz 2004, 155). For many of them, however, the “first priority was to remove ... children from the contaminating effect of life [in the city]” (Nasaw 1985, 35). The child-savers sought and enacted reforms on behalf of street children from the working and immigrant classes, campaigning for and building playgrounds and schoolyards, with the intention of giving children a venue to engage in “safe” and supervised play (36). In On the Sidewalks, the Girl appears to be a child-saver in training. She watches over the Boy, attempting to protect him by acting as his conscience. As the Boy contemplates mischief, the Girl often tries to restrain or admonish him; she works to “save” him from his own “savage” impulses. A child of the middle class, she not only demonstrates a sturdier moral code than her lower-class counterpart but also displays how she uses her goodness to uplift and discipline those who have “fallen” into moral bankruptcy. On the Sidewalks suggests that the Girl is sometimes successful in restraining the Boy’s mischief-making. In “Third Lesson” (Fig. 9.2) the caption leads the reader to conclude that the urchin is planning to burst the vendor’s balloons. The text also indicates that only the presence of a policeman makes the Boy hesitate. But the Girl has her arm around the 178 L. SAGUISAG

Fig. 9.2 L.M.G., “Third Lesson,” New York Journal, September 19, 1897. Reproduced courtesy of The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.

Boy, blocking his line of sight and effectively shielding the balloons and the vendor. Her gesture protects not only the vendor but also the Boy, as it serves to prevent him from carrying out a misdeed that could land him in jail “for thir-ty days” (L.M.G. 1897c).

JUST A HARMLESS “BAD BOY” In emphasizing the Boy’s preponderance for mischief-making, On the Sidewalks evokes a much-loved figure in American popular culture: the Bad Boy. The series implies that the Boy’s fantasies of transgressions are acceptable because they are “natural,” and part and parcel of boyishness. A number of comic-strip histories have noted the prominence of the trope of the naughty child in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century comics. The illustrated children’s book Max und Moritz: Eine Bubengeschichte in sieben Streichen (Max and Moritz: A Juvenile History in Seven Tricks, 1865) by the German artist William Busch is often ANXIOUS ENCOUNTERS: PICTURING THE STREET CHILD ... 179 credited as an important precursor to the naughty kid strips, primarily because it directly inspired The Katzenjammer Kids. Created and drawn by Rudolph Dirks, who had immigrated from Germany when he was seven, The Katzenjammer Kids features the pranks and misadventures of the brothers Hans and Fritz. It became one of the most popular comic strips at the turn of the century. Max and Moritz’sinfluence on early comic strips is undeniable, but the image of the naughty child—or, more specifically, the naughty boy—was already a fixture in American popular culture in the early half of the nineteenth century. Figures of mischief-making boys were widely reproduced in antebellum American genre painting, which served as a site for “defining and fostering national identity” (Nunes 1987, 225). Artists such as John Lewis Krimmel, William Sidney Mount, and James Clonney deployed the figure of the naughty boy as a means to describe what it meant to be an American. Their paintings celebrated the young boy’s “inherent” naughtiness, implicitly associating boyhood mischief with qualities such as independence, resourcefulness, vigor, and daring, which were seen as necessary in male children who were being groomed to inherit and maintain a capitalist-democratic society (232). While the popularity of genre painting declined in the late nineteenth century, the image of the naughty boy flourished in other forms of popular culture, such as lithographs, stereocards, cartoons, and, most notably, children’s literature. The Bad Boy literary genre included titles such as Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s Story of a Bad Boy (1870) and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)andAdventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). These texts performed what Kenneth Kidd calls “literary boy work”:theyaffirmed that it was in the best interest of male children— and, ultimately, the nation—if boys engaged in “wild” behavior (2004,53). Most of these images of Bad Boys, however, were associated with the countryside rather than the city. Sarah Burns suggests that the Bad Boy stories “almost invariably played out in the rural setting [because they] aimed to glorify the state of boyhood and stimulate nostalgia in the adult audience” (1989, 302). Pictures of happy children gallivanting in fields not only expressed adult longing for a “lost” childhood but also offered comfort to urban middle-class observers who were confronted with the sight of “swarms” of street urchins. Burns argues that images of rural Barefoot Boys provided middle-class observers with a form of escapism, allowing them to deny the reality of the poverty experienced by working- class, poor, and immigrant children in the cities. Moreover, visual and 180 L. SAGUISAG literary images of the country boy “represented an Anglo-Saxon, middle- class norm to be impressed upon the youth of the slums” (313). The Boy arguably stands as an example of a slum youth molded in the image of his countryside peers. His connection to rural troublemakers is made explicit in “Fourth Lesson,” in which he is labeled “the Bad Boy” (L.M.G. 1897d), a designation that offers the possibility that he was less a public menace and more a delightful hero. While his troublesome intent proves that urchins are products and agents of social and moral decline, his propensity for mischief also communicates his vigor, autonomy, and sense of enterprise. In other words, he displays the potential to grow up into a productive citizen. Indeed, many prominent progressive reformers who regarded street children as victims or threats also believed that they were malleable enough to be transformed. Riis noted how the urchin possessed “sturdy independence, love of freedom and absolute self-reliance,” which were “strong handles by which those who know how can catch the boy and make him useful” (2010, 105–6). Similarly, in 1909 the reformer Jane Addams celebrated what she called the “spirit of [urban] youth,” asking: “the unworldly ambitions, the romantic hopes, the make-believe world in which they live, if properly utilized, what might they not do to make our sordid cities more beautiful, more companionable?” (1972, 16). Some readers may have embraced the Boy because he embodied a rejection of urban, middle-class boyhood. Many Progressive Era observers feared that middle-class boys were becoming “softened” by city life and increasing maternal authority in the family. In “Fourth Lesson” (1897d) the Boy pounces on a character who symbolizes domesticized, feminized boyhood: a “Good Little Boy” who resembles Reginald Birch’s effeminate rendition of Little Lord Fauntleroy. The episode creates a contrast between the dynamic urchin who is poised to attack and the inert middle-class boy who appears too stunned to defend himself. The term “little” diminishes the middle-class boy, and his need for the Girl to intervene on his behalf—she grabs the urchin’s coattails—seals his emasculation. It is significant that “Fourth Lesson” shows the Boy in a rare moment of action, implying that nothing rouses his ire more than the sight of a “delicate” boy. The Boy also appears to have a special enmity for vendors and buskers. The ethnicity of many of these secondary characters is made evident visually and linguistically: some are Italian “Dagos” who wear checkered shirts and earrings, and one is a “Canny Scot” who wears a ANXIOUS ENCOUNTERS: PICTURING THE STREET CHILD ... 181 kilt and plays a bagpipe (L.M.G. 1897b, 1897g). The Boy’s own ethnicity remains vague, although the series hints at his Irish roots by revealing his name to be “Ambrose Enroughty” (L.M.G. 1897h). If the Boy is indeed Irish or Irish-American, it may seem ironic that he attacks members of cultural groups who were subjected to the same forms of dis- crimination that the Irish suffered when they arrived in America in the 1840s and 1850s. They were seen as “swarthy” and backward, and many Protestant Americans questioned whether Irish Catholics were capable of full assimilation. The figure of the lazy, apeish “shanty Irish” became a widely reproduced caricature in cartoons, comic strips, and vaudeville. But by the turn of the century, Irish immigrants and their progeny were seen as less threatening, and they began to claim a “white” and “American” identity (Fischer 1996, 74; Yee 2012, 13). Nativist animos- ity was redirected toward the new wave of immigrants who came from southern and eastern Europe and Asia. Many working-class Irish also developed contempt for “new” immigrants, whom they viewed as competition for employment. On the Sidewalks arguably documents such tensions between the Irish and other cultural groups. However, the series also evokes a perceived difference between the ethnic adult and the ethnic child: the latter is less threatening than the former because he is still malleable and thus has the potential to assimilate.

LEARNING FROM AND LAUGHING WITH THE PRANKSTER Some episodes of On the Sidewalks also demonstrate that the ﬁgure of the “indecent” child is not necessarily an antagonistic one because it permits and encourages middle-class children, as represented by the Girl, to be entertained by the misdeeds of lower-class urchins. In “Seventh Lesson” (Fig. 9.3) the two children are at the zoo, with the Boy standing in front of a caged elephant while holding a chestnut burr in his hand. As the narrator suggests, the Boy is imagining what would happen if he were to offer the burr to the elephant. If the elephant consumed it, the narrator suggests, the result would be like “a run-a-way ice-wagon col-lid[ing] with a Boil-er fac-tory” (L.M.G. 1897f). At the far right of the page stands the zoo- keeper. He glares at the Boy, presumably thinking that the presence of this child in the zoo can only result in “scenes of car-nage and crime and sich [sic]” (ibid.). Rather than scolding the Boy and instructing him to leave the elephant alone, the Girl watches him with a smile on her face. Like the Boy, she 182 L. SAGUISAG

Fig. 9.3 L.M.G., “Seventh Lesson,” New York Journal, October 17, 1897. Reproduced courtesy of The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. cradles her chin with her hand. Their similar postures create a parallel between their acts of gazing: while the Boy seems to be amused by the thought of making mischief, the Girl appears to be entertained by the idea of the Boy performing such mischief. Other episodes often depict the Girl anxiously watching over the Boy and worrying over his (potential) misdeeds, but in “Seventh Lesson” she appears to anticipate his trick with delight. The Girl’s attitude toward the Boy in “Seventh Lesson” may be understood as permitting and symbolizing white, middle-class pleasure in the disorder represented, created, and promised by lower-class children. The Girl appears to feel some hesitation, even guilt, at taking pleasure in watching the Boy commit a prank, as she makes the prudish gesture of partially covering her smile. Yet she does ﬁnd amusement in the potential for mayhem. The episode points to the possibility of members of afﬂuent classes living vicariously through members of the lower classes; they could delight in mischief and chaos while themselves remaining “innocent” of acts of transgression. ANXIOUS ENCOUNTERS: PICTURING THE STREET CHILD ... 183

Not only does the Girl model the act of watching the urchin but the captions also explicitly instruct readers to “con-tem-plate that Boy” (L.M. G. 1897c). Titled “lessons,” the captions are written in the voice of a schoolteacher addressing and conversing with “lit-tle Chil-dren” ibid. The dialogue format and syllabicated words evoke school primers designed to teach children reading and recitation. In “Second Lesson” the teacher asks: “Can any one guess what the Lit-tle Boy is thinking?” (L.M.G. 1897b). The Boy and the Girl stand in front of a fruit vendor’s cart with their backs to the reader, making it difficult for the audience to “read” the Boy’s thoughts. The teacher, however, claims that he is “won-der-ing if it would not be a good plan to swipe some of that fruit” (ibid.). Thus the teacher insists that the students (and the readers) possess the privilege to watch, scrutinize, and imagine the intentions of the street child. In doing so, however, the teacher also encourages a collapse of the distance between the audience and the Boy, asking them to put themselves in the urchin’s shoes. Moreover, the lessons do not serve to denounce the Boy’s “immoral” behavior. In “Fifth Lesson,” after listing the possible dire consequences if the Boy carries out his prank, the teacher tells his/her “dar-lings” to “al-ways give un-to oth-ers the rink-y dink be-fore they can give it un-to you” (L.M.G. 1897e). Rather than criticizing the Boy for setting a bad example, the teacher parodies the golden rule, implying that giving “the rink-y dink”—or acting in a deceitful manner—is a useful skill in an urban environment. By understanding and acting like the Boy, one will be prepared to counteract “dangerous” elements of the city, which, ironically, are embodied by the Boy himself. Thus the series imparts the lesson of sympathizing with a child who may appear “strange” and inscrutable. In coaxing readers to identify with and learn from the urchin, On the Sidewalks suggests that its protagonist is not a figure to be laughed at but rather a subject they could laugh with. As demonstrated in “Third Lesson,” the Boy’s pranks create a platform for humorous social commentary. The caption appears to warn children against emulating him lest they end up in jail. The Boy, as suggested by the text, hesitates to carry out his prank because he “fears the Cop!” (L.M. G. 1897c). “So shines the Ma-jes-ty of the Law a-bove all things, lit-tle Chil-dren!” declares the narrator. But in a humorous cartoon, this statement is meant to be ironic, serving to denounce rather than praise the state of law enforcement. In fact, such misgiving for figures who police the behavior of others is established earlier in the caption, when it takes a jab at 184 L. SAGUISAG

Comstockery. By suggesting that the Boy may be of “some re-la-tion to An-tho-ny Com-stock,” the episode characterizes Comstock’s fervent campaign against the distribution of “obscene” materials to be as disruptive and infuriating as an urchin’s pranks. The Boy’s troublemaking ways, in other words, provide opportunities to mock “real” threats to society. On the Sidewalks demonstrates how Progressive Era forms of popular culture were used to examine conceptions of difference. In particular, it shows how cartoons and comic strips often explored and tested the boundaries of gender, class, and ethnicity. Through the ﬁgure of the Boy, On the Sidewalks suggests that the boundaries between “us” and “them” are not always rigid. In depicting the Boy as simultaneously suspect and sympathetic, the series complicates the notion of street children as a conundrum to be solved; readers are encouraged to see the urchin as a ﬁgure who could also expose and confront other pressing urban problems. During its short run, On the Sidewalks depicted the complexity of urban encounters, of the shifting relationships of the city’s inhabitants who came face to face with one another on the sidewalks of New York.

REFERENCES

Primary Sources Addams, J. 1972. The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. Orig. pub. 1909. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Aldrich, T. B. 1870. The Story of a Bad Boy. Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co. http:// www.gutenberg.org/ﬁles/1948/1948-h/1948-h.htm (accessed December 6, 2014). Busch, W. 1962. Max and Moritz: A Juvenile History in Seven Tricks.Orig. pub. in German, 1865. Trans. C. T. Brooks; ed. H. A. Klein. New York: Dover Books. Lawlor, C., and J. W. Blake. 1894. The Sidewalks of New York [sheet music]. New York: Howley, Haviland. http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/inharmony/ detail.do?action=detail&fullItemID=/lilly/devincent/LL-SDV-229010 (accessed January 29, 2016). L.M.G. 1897a. First Lesson. On the Sidewalks of New York [cartoon]. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection. SFS 60-5-1. The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. L.M.G. 1897b. Second Lesson. On the Sidewalks of New York [cartoon]. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection. SFS 60-5-2. The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. ANXIOUS ENCOUNTERS: PICTURING THE STREET CHILD ... 185

L.M.G. 1897c. Third Lesson. On the Sidewalks of New York [cartoon]. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection. SFS 60-5-3. The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. L.M.G. 1897d. Fourth Lesson. On the Sidewalks of New York [cartoon]. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection. SFS 60-5-4. The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. L.M.G. 1897e. Fifth Lesson. On the Sidewalks of New York [cartoon]. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection. SFS 60-6-1. The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. L.M.G. 1897f. Seventh Lesson. On the Sidewalks of New York [cartoon]. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection. SFS 60-7-1. The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. L.M.G. 1897g. Ninth Lesson. On the Sidewalks of New York [cartoon]. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection. SFS 60-7-3. The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. L.M.G. 1897h. Thirteenth Lesson. On the Sidewalks of New York [cartoon]. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection. SFS 1-1-3. The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. Riis, J. 2010. How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements in New York. Orig. pub. 1890. In How the Other Half Lives: Authoritative texts, Contexts, Criticism, ed. H. H. Diner. New York: W.W. Norton. Twain, M. 1876. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Hartford, CT: American Publishing Co. Twain, M. 1885. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Charles L. Webster and Co. Wald, L. 1971. The House on Henry Street. Orig. pub. 1915. New York: Dover Publications.

Secondary Sources Burns, S. 1989. Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Fischer, R. A. 1996. Them Damned Pictures: Explorations in American Political Cartoon Art. North Haven, CT: Archon. Holtz, A. 2013a. Ink-Slinger Proﬁles: T. S. Allen. Stripper’s Guide. http://strip persguide.blogspot.com/2013/07/ink-slinger-proﬁles-ts-allen.html (accessed April 10, 2014). Holtz, A. 2013b. Obscurity of the Day: On the Sidewalks of New York. Stripper’s Guide. http://strippersguide.blogspot.com/2013/07/obscurity-of-day-on- sidewalks-of-new.html (accessed April 10, 2014). Illick, J. 2002. American Childhoods. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 186 L. SAGUISAG

Kidd, K. 2004. Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Maresca, P. (ed.). 2013. Society Is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip 1895–1915. Palo Alto: Sunday Press. Mintz, S. 2004. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Nasaw, D. 1985. Children of the City: At Work and at Play. Garden City, NY: Anchor. Nunes, J. M. D. C. 1987. The Naughty Child in Nineteenth Century American Art. Journal of American Studies 21(2): 225–47. Wood, M. 2004. Class Warfare on the Urban Stage. The Yellow Kid on the Paper Stage. people.virginia.edu/~mmw3v/html/ykid/class.htm (accessed April 10, 2014). Yee, S. 2012. An Immigrant Neighborhood: Interethnic and Interracial Encounters in New York before 1930. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Zurier, R. 2006. Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lara Saguisag is Assistant Professor of English at the College of Staten Island/ CUNY, New York, USA. Her articles on children’s literature and comics have appeared in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, The International Journal of Comic Art, and The Horn Book. She served as co-editor of The Lion and the Unicorn’s special issue Children’s Rights and Children’s Literature. Her current book project, “Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comic Strips,” examines the ways late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century comic strips participated in and intertwined contemporary discourses on childhood and citizenship. CHAPTER 10

Russian Picturebooks from 1922 to 1934: Modernization, Sense of Nationhood, Internationalism

Verena Rutschmann

In the decades immediately preceding and following 1900, the Russian Empire underwent a fundamental social transformation that was to sweep away the old order in the October Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing civil war. A new sense of Soviet identity had to be established; inclusions and exclusions were rethought. The quest for and propagation of new identities was reﬂected in the children’s literature of the time, as elsewhere. This chapter is concerned with the image of self and other in Russian-language picturebooks published in the Soviet Union after 1922.1 Russian literature for children developed so fast and so multifariously during the early decades of the twentieth century as to be rivaled by only one analogous period in western Europe: that of the early years of industrialization a good century earlier, likewise a time of profound social and economic change. A number of the Russian picturebooks of

Translated from German by Michael Loughridge

V. Rutschmann (*) Research Department, Swiss Institute of Children’s Literature, Zurich, Switzerland

© The Author(s) 2017 187 E. O’Sullivan, A. Immel (eds.), Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8_10 188 V. RUTSCHMANN theearlySovietphasewereofremarkableartisticandliterarymeritand became classics; others fell by the wayside. This effervescent, often experimental children’s literature flourished vigorously until the early 1930s, in spite of recurrent fierce criticism—directed principally at the books’ playful character and elements of fantasy—on political and educational grounds. The principles of Socialist Realism, mandatory after the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers of 1934, put a definitive end to this picturebook art.

BACKGROUND The boom in Russian children’s literature was enabled by a combination of disparate factors: the new direction in fine arts and literature since the closing years of the nineteenth century and the Soviet government’seffortsinthefield of educational policy in the years following the October Revolution. After World War I, the October Revolution of 1917, and the civil war that continued until 1921, the prewar social order had collapsed and the economy was in ruins. During the national reconstruction period, technical and economic modernization were the priorities, along with the political mobilization of the populace. More than on any other group, the burden of expectation lay on the nation’s children, the fabric of the coming society. Education was accordingly a prime obligation of the state, so children’s literature in turn, because of its educative role, was supported by the state during the difficult early years of reconstruction. New educational and artistic ideas were adopted as part of children’s preparation for the tasks that lay ahead. They would shape the future according to the ideas they learned now. Leading minds in the arts and sciences reacted to the collapse of the old structures by seeking new forms of expression and appropriate interpretive approaches. The period’s picturebooks, in their own way, clearly reflect the artistic and political discourse and exceptional social circumstances of their age. New identification models for Russian children were created, while old stereotypes for other ethnic groups were recontextualized as dictated both by modernization and by the consolidation and extension of political power inside the Soviet Union and internationally. My concern here is with the images of themselves and of others that were presented to Russian-speaking children aged five to nine by illustrations in picturebooks. RUSSIAN PICTUREBOOKS FROM 1922 TO 1934: MODERNIZATION, SENSE ... 189

SELF-IMAGES Over the course of the nineteenth century, two Russian self-images emerged as the most important. One was the popular image from the lubok, the prints that showed the Russian peasant in smock, baggy trousers, and cord shoes trudging behind the plough, or Russian women wearing the sarafan and headdress. The other was generated toward the end of the century in literature and the arts, with the help of history and folklore: forest and river landscapes felt to be genuinely Russian in character, and architecture and costumes pre-dating the reforms of Peter the Great—opulent timber houses, churches, and palaces bearing witness to the glories of the past and the wealth of the nation. All that remained of these self-images in the Soviet era, in some rare instances, was the Russian peasant following his plough in picturebooks that emphasized the unity of workers and peasants in the new nation (Deineka 1928). But while the revolution put an abrupt end to many traditions, there were still images with specifically Russian connotations: women and girls with brightly colored headscarves and cord shoes, men wearing the smock and the Russian peaked cap, the kartuz. These pictures portrayed the rural population, new town dwellers recently arrived from the countryside, and workers (Fig. 10.1). The same images can be seen in contemporary photographs. The images of the wealthy boyar and the timeless, magical Russian countryside vanished from the picturebooks of the 1920s, replaced by the figure of the “new human being,” builder of the socialist society in which technological progress and social justice would become realities. The new human being was the key to economic and political modernization. Rational and responsible, he would have an unlimited aptitude for learning. Faith in the rationality of scientific and technological progress, wholehearted endorsement of urban living, and rejection of the past all became part of the program. This scenario represented a universalist aspiration: it embraced every member of post-revolutionary society and thus was not specifically Russian, or indeed even explicitly Soviet.

MODERN TIMES:NEW VERSUS OLD The new human being is portrayed in exemplary form in the picturebook Vchera i segodnia (Yesterday and Today, Lebedev 1925b). Like all picturebooks of the period, Vchera i segodnia is a slim pamphlet of twelve pages. 190 V. RUTSCHMANN

Fig. 10.1 Illustration by Vladimir Konashevich from V. Mirovich, Nasha ulitsa (Our Street) (Leningrad, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izd., 1926). Reproduced Courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library RUSSIAN PICTUREBOOKS FROM 1922 TO 1934: MODERNIZATION, SENSE ... 191

Even the front cover is a pictorial expression of faith in progress: the dark past in black and white is contrasted with an optimistic vision of the future, in color. At the top of the page, three hunched figures in black and white are engaged in some laborious occupation; lower down, three Soviet workers in radiant blues and reds stride self-confidently ahead, their bearing erect, each grasping the tools of his trade. The figures are striking and strongly evocative. Text and images pursue this antithesis. The author, Samuil Marshak, and illustrator, Vladimir Lebedev, use everyday objects to bring the changes home to children visually. New technology makes tasks easier but also implies a new and more efficient pattern of behavior. The typewriter keys—clear-cut, geometrically defined objects—fire like artillery salvoes, supplanting the old quills and ink pots and ink’s messy blots and smears. In such ways, technology shapes the new human being of the future: the child. Modern rationality is illustrated in a similarly programmatic vein, but with inferior artistry, in Oktiabrenok postrelenok (Genius Octobrist, Maliutin 1925). An oktiabrenok (Octobrist), who happens also to be a postrelenok (boy genius), encounters various fairy-tale characters—a witch, a fairy, and others—on his way to school.2 All promise him something, only to be mocked and rejected: today’s world has no need of such figures. The three-tone illustrations in blue and orange, striking and caricaturist in style, betray the affinities of the illustrator, Ivan Maliutin, with the satirical posters in the windows of ROSTA, the state news agency. The hero, a plump lad, is an incurably smug character with a grin so vacuous as to permit the inference that the illustrator seeks in fact to parody the current discussion of the harmfulness of fairy tales. The ideas spelled out so programmatically in Vchera i segodnia are put across in less overt form in other picturebooks. The modern age is reflected in the subjects featured: architecture, urban transport (cars, trams, motor bicycles), and, once the first five-year plan was under way in 1929, factories and farm tractors. Mobility and rapidity typify the new human being and, in the context of sport, link naturally to the goals of the hygiene movement, which was an important strand in modernization. Artists such as Vladimir Lebedev, Vladimir Konashevich, Aleksei Pakhomov, and David Shterenberg depicted healthy, confident children striding briskly and purposefully along city streets, engaging in sports, or at play in natural surroundings, particularly at Pioneer camps and holiday camps, settings that combined modernization and political education (Fig. 10.2). 192 V. RUTSCHMANN

Fig. 10.2 Illustration by David Shterenberg from Anatolii Mariengof, Bobka ﬁzkul’turnik (Bobka the Sportsman) (Moscow: GIZ, 1930b). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library RUSSIAN PICTUREBOOKS FROM 1922 TO 1934: MODERNIZATION, SENSE ... 193

Membership of this modern society was conferred by work. A boy’s dreams for the future are depicted by Nisson Shifrin in Vladimir Maiakovskii’s Kem byt’? (What Will I Be When I Grow Up?, Shifrin 1930): the same boy in blue shorts appears in a succession of different work clothes indicated in outline and with accessory details as appropriate, added and removed, collage style (Fig. 10.3). Specialized jobs are shown (driver, doctor, seaman), with the respective working environments appearing on the facing page—impressive images of machinery, landscapes, and modern buildings. Proizvodstvennye knigi (industry books) showed machinery and workers engaged in the manufacture of various products. The books present the sequence of production processes, with skilled workers handling the specialized tasks at each stage, in this way reinforcing the impression of an efﬁcient collective. Typical examples are Khlebozavod Nr. 3 (Bread Factory No. 3, Deineko and Troshin 1930)andStol (The Table, Ėvenbakh and Zhitkov 1926). Picturebooks foregrounding economic modernization used imagery of buildings, machines, and modern vehicles. One stereotypical image was the conﬁdent workman, tools over his broad shoulder; another was the headscarved female operative at her workplace, like the mother in Pesnia o Mame (The Song of Mother, Shterenberg 1930a)(Fig. 10.4).3 However, such individualistic images are not a prominent feature of the modernization picturebooks.

SOCIAL OTHERNESS The concept of the new human being has an antithesis, social “otherness.” It appears in images from the past, as in Vchera i segodnia or Oktiabr’skie pesenki (Songs of October, Popova 1927). In the latter, a double-page spread contrasts the hard toil on the land with the effortlessness of work using modern machinery. “Otherness” might also take the form of a cultural symbol, such as a church, its remains juxtaposed with soaring new buildings on the jacket of a school textbook (Beliakov 1931). When marked by “wrong behavior” rather than obsolescence, social otherness would be depicted in stereotypes. In Marshak’s Morozhenoe (Ice Cream, Lebedev 1925a), Lebedev gives the gluttonous bourgeois ﬁgure the familiar, internationally accepted outward appearance of the capitalist: a fat man, top hat on his head, complete with waistcoat and gold watch chain. In Morozhenoe this ﬁgure soon suffers retribution for his 194 V. RUTSCHMANN

Fig. 10.3 Illustration by Nisson Shifrin from Vladimir Maiakovskii, Kem byt’? (What Will I Be When I Grow Up?) (Moscow: GIZ, 1930). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library greed. After consuming all the ice cream within reach, he becomes colder and colder, ending up as a mountain of snow and affording children sleigh rides in summer. RUSSIAN PICTUREBOOKS FROM 1922 TO 1934: MODERNIZATION, SENSE ... 195

Fig. 10.4 Illustration by David Shterenberg from Ė. Ėmden, Pesnia o Mame (The Song of Mother) (Moscow: GIZ, 1930a). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library

The greedy bourgeois in Morozhenoe is a comically exaggerated figure. In the fantasy context, he has none of the menace that the same figure exudes in political caricatures and posters, and the mix of the surreal and 196 V. RUTSCHMANN the droll at the end ensures that the story is not dismissed as a mere plodding moral fable. The same applies to Skazka o Pete, tolstom rebenke, i o Sime, kotoryi tonkii (The Tale of Peter, the Fat Boy, and Sima, Who Is Thin, Kupreianov 1925) by Vladimir Maiakovskii. Nikolai Kupreianov’s images are striking, with two-dimensional figures on a white background. Fat Petia, the greedy son of a wealthy confectioner, is kitted out with a monstrous pair of jaws and a black sailor suit with bourgeois connotations. Literally insatiable, Petia finally devours a bicycle and explodes. Sima, meantime, an athletic type and used to responsibility, conducts a squad of Pioneers into the forest for physical training. While they take their break, they are suddenly showered from above with the explosion’s fallout, the myriad sweets Petia had devoured without taking off the wrappers. Maiakovskii’s poem satirizes the profiteers of the New Economic Policy, while also sharing Struwwelpeter territory as a parody of moral fables with unhappy endings.

ASENSE OF SOVIET IDENTITY In picturebooks intended to contribute to political mobilization and the creation of collective awareness, especially after the launch of the first five- year plan, the capitalist and other bogeyman figures are presented without a trace of comedy. These books generally use new stereotypes and symbols, one favorite motif being the May 1 celebration with its processions and public meetings. All representations, without exception, flourish the red flag or slogan-bearing banners; sometimes the red star is seen. The visual language is very similar to that of political posters: broad-shouldered workers and peasants march alongside stalwart, confident-looking women, the workers in blue overalls and peaked cap, the peasants in smock and fur chapka, the women with or without red headscarf (Popova 1927). The Pioneers march in the procession, waving little flags, singing, and beating drums (Borovskaia 1926; Kachkacheva 1926). The soldiers, wearing greatcoat and budenovka (the cloth peaked helmet of Semyon Budyonny’s cavalry), symbolize the victory of the revolution. The new positive stereotypes are juxtaposed against their old, negative counterparts—the fat capitalist, imperialist general, bearded Orthodox priest—seen, for example, in the May 1 procession in Bei v baraban (Beat the Drum, Ivanova 1932). These bogeyman are universal stereotypes, denoting the class enemy not only in the Soviet Union but also abroad. They appear in prettified form, but still as enemies, among the toy RUSSIAN PICTUREBOOKS FROM 1922 TO 1934: MODERNIZATION, SENSE ... 197

figures of Voina igrushek (War of the Toys, Mal’t 1925). When they invade the peace-loving realm of Russian toy figures—tin soldiers, nesting dolls, tumblers—they are repulsed by brave soldiers wearing the emblematic budenovka. Old literary patterns, such as the fantastic tale and the moral exemplum (and their parodies), and new forms aligned to reportage tell of the new or future society. At the same time, the accompanying images demonstrate the diversity of contemporary art. The importance of technology is reflected in the constructivist illustrations of the Chichagova sisters (for ex. Chichagova, Chichagova and Smirnov 1926), while other artists introduce the idiom of the political poster and political caricature into the picturebook. But traces of art noveau can also be found in the works of such artists as Vladimir Konashevich. Picturebooks that foreground political mobilization exhibit less diversity in their forms of expression. The red flag and the red scarf soon become stereotypes of correct political consciousness, obligatory also for the non-Russian population of the Soviet Union.

THE MULTINATIONAL STATE:OTHER NATIONS WITHIN THE SOVIET UNION People from other cultures are usually stereotyped in Soviet picturebooks through distinctive clothing. The stereotype’s function varies according to whether the point at issue is national self-awareness, fraternity of peoples, international class war, or modernization. The radical new departures of the 1920s embraced not only the social classes but also the different nationalities within the Russian Empire and the relationships among them. Tsarist Russia had developed since medieval times as a polity of multiple peoples, comparable to the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The revolution led at once to a repositioning of individual regions and ethnic minorities. The Soviet Union was founded as a federal state in which ethnic minorities gained far-reaching cultural rights at the regional and local levels. There is almost no reﬂection of these events in Russian-language picturebooks. In the rare depictions of other ethnic groups, folklore is the dominant subject, as in Deti narodov S.S.S.R. (Children of the USSR Nations, Vatagin 1928). Various children in traditional costume are shown pursuing stereotypical occupations. On the cover, a Central Asian boy and a Samoyed boy shake hands. Elsewhere in the book, Chukchis tame a polar bear cub; a Tungusic practices archery for the hunt; a young 198 V. RUTSCHMANN

Byelorussian herdsman plays his zhaleika, a woodwind instrument, beside his cows; and an Ossetian boy leads his goats and sheep through the inaccessible mountains. The Russian boy is on his way to school, preparing himself to be a worthy citizen-worker. The exceptionally decorative illustrations in Devochki SSSR (Girls of the USSR, Borisov 1929) depict girls in traditional costumes representing the different nationalities: Russian, Tatar, Mongolian, Mordvin, Ukrainian, Turkestan, Samoyed, and a gen- eralized “Caucasian.” The Caucasian nationalities are briefly introduced in Skaz pro Severnyi Kavkaz (A Tale of the Northern Caucasus, Ianchevskii 1927). Chechens, Kabardins, Cossacks, Circassians, and others appear in representative settings and wear traditional clothing. An Ossetian man, for instance, clad in the burka, is shown on a narrow mountain path near his Ingush highland village. Terse though the captions are, the author’s ethnographical interests are discernible in the use of culture-specific terminology. The multiplicity of ethnic groups featured in these books represents the vastness of the Soviet Union, but their visual representatives remain essentially ornamental, given the virtual absence of anything indi- cating togetherness. Similarly, the “meeting as friends” in Severnyi mai (Northern May, Borovskaia 1933) shows only a superficial togetherness. Children from the south travel far north, covering the final stretch by reindeer-drawn sleigh. The opening picture had shown them planting trees in springtime, but in the northern region it is still winter on May 1, and they are greeted by a boy swathed in animal hides. To celebrate May Day, a sleigh race is organized. A little red flag flutters on the antler of one of the reindeer, and it appears again in the closing picture, adorning the trumpet blown by a little Pioneer wrapped in thick layers of skins. The red flag, emblem of a shared set of convictions, unites children from such different regions, while the long journey and the different climate become symbolic of the huge distances children must negotiate to celebrate their togetherness in the Soviet Union. What connects all these different individuals is work. In Deti vostochnych kolkhozov (Children of the Eastern Collective Farms, Kashina 1931), children in Central Asia traditionally both go to school and help with the farm tasks—shearing sheep, gathering mulberries, and harvesting cotton. The images dispense with captions. In an afterword, Kashina emphasizes the Soviet achievement: school and lessons are in the mother tongue, women no longer cover their faces. Amarė detskii sad (Amare, the Kindergarten, Kashina 1932) informs Russian children about Roma RUSSIAN PICTUREBOOKS FROM 1922 TO 1934: MODERNIZATION, SENSE ... 199 children. They are seen attending school, where they learn, have fun, and make music. Other pictures show the parents at work in the factory or on the construction site. Here, too, the clothing is traditional, but it fits naturally into the modern daily routine. This book was simultaneously published in the Romani language. The Russian edition has a page with words in contrasting typograpraphy and printed in red: “V nashem soiuze vse narody ravny—v nashem soiuze vse narody druzhny” (In our federation all peoples are equal—in our federation all peoples are friends). Above them, in the same typesize and color, is a sentence in Romani. Like the proizvodstvennye knigi, Buriatiia (Iakobson 1931), a picturebook about the eastern Siberian republic Buryatia, Turkestanskii chlopok (Cotton from Turkestan, Rankov 1931) and Evreiskii kolkhoz (The Jewish Kolkhoz, Boim 1931) depict manufacturing processes. Here, however, the cultural context is agrarian: cattle rearing in Buryatia, cotton production in Turkestan, and mixed agriculture on a Jewish collective farm. Adults and children alike attend to the various tasks. Although their appearance is exotic in Buriatiia and Turkestanskii chlopok, work renders these people familiar. Where modernization clashes to any degree with a traditional economic system, the non-Russian culture generally loses. In Poezd v Kazakhstan (Train to Kazakhstan, Kozlovaia 1931), the locomotive of the new Turkestan-Siberia Railway (opened in 1931) is much faster than the “old-fashioned” camels. Khlopok (Cotton, Manuilov 1929) shows cotton planting and processing by Uzbek peasants in detailed illustrations: sowing, irrigation by means of simple waterwheels, transportation, and eventual sale. However, the traditional spinning, weaving, and printing of the “coarse fabrics” using simple machinery is contrasted in the illustrations with superior modern textile machinery. In Nashi tropiki (Our Tropics, 1931), Lev Bruni celebrates the achievements of Soviet agriculture on the Black Sea coast—tea, oranges, bananas—in luxuriant imagery. A short introductory text explains that, until quite recently, this area had been a landscape of relatively unproductive fields and forests, home to sheep and goats tended by half-wild Kurdish herders. The women on the tea kolkhoz wear traditional garb but are no longer veiled. The veil is still widely worn, however, as can be seen from a picture captioned “An ancient street in Batum.” A young mother with a face veil looks straight at the viewer, while behind her another woman can be seen in the street wearing the chador. In a May 1 picture, a few women with the chador are seen ducking awkwardly past the procession, excluded from the festivities. 200 V. RUTSCHMANN

While some of the picturebooks depict the Soviet Union’s other nationalities in the context of modernization or necessary development, others concern themselves solely with the economic significance of the region shown. One such is a folded book with neither title nor publisher’s imprint. When folded, it has a compass rose on its front cover, with the four page edges marking north, south, east, and west. Opened out to four pages, it forms a long-armed cross. The east arm of the cross has text with information about the Kirghiz and Uzbek people, their domestic animals, and the uses to which they are put. The Kirghiz are shown with their yurts and their sheep, the Uzbeks in the cotton fields. On the back of this arm, information about industry is provided, in this case coal mining and ore extraction in addition to cotton production. Information of a similar type is printed on the three remaining arms of the cross: Tatars and Georgians (south), Ukrainians and Byelorussians (west), and Samoyeds and Yakuts (north). In the center is Russia. The cross’s arms enumerate the wealth of resources on which the Soviet Union can draw, and the ethnic diversity points to its sheer vastness. Probably the most successful example of intercultural contact is found in a picturebook entitled Dzhanik i Kiriusha (Dzhanik and Kiriusha, Goncharov 1932). It tells how a Moscow boy, Kiriusha, and his mother visit Dzhanik’s mother at her faraway home. The first picture shows a mountain landscape with a camel in the foreground. Ontheoppositepageweseethetwoboys:Kiriushaiswarmlycladin overcoat, boots, and fur hat and holds his mother’s hand; Dzhanik is carried in a fold of cloth slung over his mother’s back, and she wears a long dress and the hijab. Once again, the length of journey—three days and three nights—is an indicator of the nation’s size. A double-page illustration shows Kiriusha and his mother in the railway carriage; on the right, Dzhanik’s mother awaits their arrival, seated on a rug. Another picture shows the two mothers chatting. Their body language expresses a degree of intimacy, and yet for Kiriusha—and the target readership—the scene is exotic, as the two women are seated on cushions on the floor. Dzhanik’s tall, luxuriantly moustached father, in his Caucasian greatcoat and papacha (fur cap) and with his dagger at his side, is a rather intimidating sight for Kiriusha at first. But the ice is broken when he hoists Kiriusha on his shoulders to carry him home, followed by all the village children, eager to meet the visitors and giving their “brother from Moscow” a noisy welcome. While this conclusion may seem formulaic, Dzhanik i Kiriusha is nevertheless an RUSSIAN PICTUREBOOKS FROM 1922 TO 1934: MODERNIZATION, SENSE ... 201 unusual picturebook in that it shows Russians and non-Russians on level terms, in both the text and the pictures. Both closeness and distance are evoked without undue simplification. Overall, depictions of ethnic groups show a certain imbalance. Wherever ethnic diversity stands for the hugeness of the Soviet Union in the folklore-focused picturebooks, there will be encounters with children from the western territories of Ukraine and Byelorussia. The books make no mention of the German populations of the southern steppes and the Volga, who suffered great hardships from 1929 onward under dekulakization. The books tend to focus instead on Central Asia, Siberia, and the Caucasus. These regions were economic- ally and strategically important, and the construction of the Trans- Siberian Railway was one of the great national enterprises. But these were also regions associated with adventure and, in the case of the Black Sea coast, holidays. Cultural specifics linked to religion, notably places of worship, are neither shown nor mentioned. The sole exception is the veil worn by Muslim women, but it is rejected, without mention of religion, as a mark of past oppression.

CHILDREN OF THE NORTH AND OF THE SOUTH MEET ONE ANOTHER IN BOOKS Advertising its program in 1930, the state publishing organization (Gosizdat) produced a poster captioned “Deti severa i iuga v knige vstre- tiatsia drug s drugom” (Children of the North and of the South Meet One Another in Books). In the poster’s left column a reindeer stands as background to a fur-clad child contemplating a naked African boy, who for his part has a giraffe behind him and a crocodile on a lead. The right column shows an ocean steamship, American Indians with feather headdresses and bows, another Indian holding a spear and mounted on a horse, and a large number of animals. As in the portrayal of non-Russian nationalities within the Soviet Union, stereotypes are used, mainly of clothing—or lack of it on the African’s part—to give Russian children an impression of people living in other parts of the world. Colonial stereotypes linger on. One particularly uninhibited example, O tom kak priechal shokolad v Mossel’prom (And That’s How Chocolate Came to the Mossel’prom, Ganf 1925), starts with two boys picking chocolate beans from a palm tree. One is an African wearing earrings and a loincloth, the other an American Indian with 202 V. RUTSCHMANN feather decoration and a ring through his nose. In Raznotsvetnye rebiata (Children of Different Colors, Bonch-Osmolovskaia 1928), thirty boys from all over the world, all of them in folklore-based costumes, race toward a ﬁnish line on a raised platform. A rather surprising message in front of it reads: “Unanimously, we urge you not to lie abed till all hours, to wash daily, to desist from shrieking, and not to make mischief or pick your nose.” Whether this gathering constituted a Children’s International or not is a moot question. There was some striving to bring foreign cultures closer. In each of three books, Deti Kitaia (Chinese Children, 1929a), Deti Negrov (African Children, 1929b), and Iaponskie deti (Japanese Children, 1929c), Vasilii Vatagin and Michail Ezuchevskii show a family going about its everyday life at work, at school, and in celebration. The clothing, setting, and activities are for the most part stereotypical. It is a traditional, intact world in each case, depicted in appealing illustrations. These books attempt, without a political agenda, to convey a positive image of other cultures. People living in distant lands are also brought closer through work. As workers, they are related to Russians and part of the Communist International, but at the same time they are exotic because of their habitat, as in Ot Kauchuka do kaloshi (From Rubber Tree to Galoshes, Deineko and Troshin 1931). Here the cover is divided into two panels: on the left, a dark-skinned woman taps a rubber tree in the jungle; on the right, a boy in rubber galoshes hurries through a downpour. Chai (Tea, Kisil’ 1929) describes how a Chinese family—parents and two children—pluck tea leaves, then process and dry them, and ﬁnally package the end product. However, the style of portrayal used in this picturebook ensures that the characters remain exotic: doll-like, dressed in colored robes, and seen against a black background, they evoke Chinese lacquerware. The foreignness of the setting is underlined by the tea’s long journey from China to the Soviet Union.

INTERNATIONALISM Affirmation of internationalism as a fraternity of peoples, depiction of the class struggle as waged in other countries, and the Soviet Union’s “mission” are three prominent themes of picturebook portrayal of people in other countries. On the cover of Oktiabrskie pesenki (Songs of October, Popova 1927), however, the internationalism is purely decorative. The RUSSIAN PICTUREBOOKS FROM 1922 TO 1934: MODERNIZATION, SENSE ... 203 top left corner and a strip on the right show a European or American metal worker or miner, tool in hand. At the top center an Indian or African, not clearly identifiable, wears an apron and holds a bunch of bananas; at the upper right a Chinese man carries two pots on a pole; and at bottom center an Australian brandishes a boomerang and a multi- colored shield. Not one of these personages figures inside the picturebook. Internationalism is usually illustrated in picturebooks by way of the activities of the Pioneers. The title picture of Detskii Internatsional (The Children’s International, Echeistov 1926) shows a Pioneer marching forwardwitharedflag and trumpet, followed by a Chinese man and a Scotsman, identified through clothing and eye slant. The story is about children who decide to form a commune in which they will live and work together. With help from Georgy Chicherin, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, they invite children from all over the world to join them. And they duly come, in traditional national dress, bringing their country’s products with them and telling of their respective homelands (Fig. 10.5). The Eskimo brings fish liver oil on his sled; the boy from Baku lists the uses of mineral oil; the Chinese child brings tea and tells of silk and rice; the Turk, cigarette in mouth, brings coffee and grapes; the African arrives naked, perched on his elephant, the indispensable working beast; the Persian enters on a camel; the punctilious German, clad in a shirt with sailor’s collar and straw hat, recommends his services as an excellent worker, wherever needed; the American drives up in a Ford; the English boy, dressed as a sailor, points to his proficiency in building lighthouses and ships; while his French counterpart brings an airplane. Adopting the slogan “Proletarians of all countries, unite in a camp of friends together” and sustained by utopian zeal, they build a flourishing (almost exclusively male) commune in which all of them work for the common good. In this text, the national stereotypes emphasize diversity and the wealth of resources that can be brought to a shared project for the benefitofall. Putting a national stereotype to a very different use, Lidiia Popova makes fun of the “otherness” figure in Skazka o tolstom shucmane i ob uchenom doktore (The Tale of the Fat Policeman and the Learned Doctor, 1930). A “fat German constable” wearing a stiff Prussian military hat and high black boots rushes to the doctor’soffice with the news that the city of Halle, the city of Hamburg, the city of Frisco—indeed, the whole world— is sick, suffering from “congress fever.” The principal symptom is that 204 V. RUTSCHMANN

Fig. 10.5 Illustration by Georgii Echeistov from Yurii Gralitsa, Detskii international (The Children’s International) (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1926). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library RUSSIAN PICTUREBOOKS FROM 1922 TO 1934: MODERNIZATION, SENSE ... 205 children worldwide want to attend the Second International Congress of Pioneers. Echali rebiata (The Children Have Set Off, Glebova and Vysokovskii 1930) represents the transition from internationalism to isolationism. Children from every corner of the Soviet Union come together for a congress, joined by a number of foreigners. They form a long procession to file into a stadium, bearing flags and banners, making music, and singing. A profusion of different headcoverings indicates ethnicity. A Kalmuck delegate takes the stage to deliver a speech in her native tongue and is followed by a flaxen-haired German. Various resolutions are passed, and then those present act out how in wartime they as Pioneers would defend Moscow. The pictures show tanks and cavalry, children running with rifles or lying “dead” on the ground. Once the commandant has proclaimed the war over, all the national groups line up in march formation, with the red flag at the head. The impact of the pictures is mixed; there is little to signify fraternity of peoples beyond the image of the procession to the stadium and another showing two Kalmucks, identified by their head- wear, embracing a boy whose nationality (Japanese) has to be discovered from the text. The war scenes evoke a readiness for defense rather than fraternity, marking thechangeinemphasistoassertionof national unity in the face of an external threat and the parallel transition from internationalism to “one nation globalisation” (Kelly 2003,20). For the time being, however, the theme of internationalism lingered in the context of liberation struggles in China, India, and Africa (and sporadically in Germany). This narrowing of focus suggests diminished expectations with regard to proletarian world revolution, balanced by hope of revolution at least in colonial regions. Four children are introduced in Bratishki (Brothers, Echeistov and Barto 1929): a white Soviet child, a black African child, a brown-skinned Indian child, and a yellow-skinned Chinese child. Each of the following four double-page spreads shows a mother with her child on the left-hand page and the fathers (in China the mother) at work on the right-hand page. The mothers are putting their children to bed and singing a lullaby about the hard work and the liberation struggle, with the refrain, “Grow on, my little lad, you have brothers, you are not on your own” (8, 10, 12). But the Russian mother sings different words: “Always remember your faraway brothers! Perhaps you’ll stand with them in fire and smoke and with them win the victory” (14). 206 V. RUTSCHMANN

The Soviet child is privileged because his father has already vanquished the oppressors; white silhouettes on a red background above the images of men working depict scenes from the conﬂicts. The prominence given in Bratishki to the work theme and the repeated depiction of the bedtime ritual familiar to every child reinforce the message that “all men are equal.” The jacket illustration puts across the message of equality by showing the variously colored heads of the four children across the top and again below, but this time wearing the peaked green cap with the red star at center front—the budenovka, symbol of brotherly concord.

THE VANGUARD NATION IN THE INTERNATIONAL CLASS STRUGGLE Other picturebooks clearly propagate political images of “otherness,” foreignness. Exploited and abused people in China, India, and Africa are shown alongside the usual hostile depictions of capitalists, clerics, colonial military commanders, and indigenous aristocracy. This is the pattern in Riksha iz Shankhaia (Rickshaw from Shanghai, Adlivankin 1927): the worn-out rickshawman is obliged to render taxi services to a succession of such malign figures without even earning the means to bring enough food home to his family each night. In Malen’kii chernyi Murzuk (Little Black Murzuk, Adlivankin 1926) a gunboat brings the whole roster of class enemies to the local coastline. Murzuk’s family and neighbors are slaughtered, and in the final image, Murzuk is alone with an elephant, both weeping. A number of picturebooks deal with China. The long common border made the issue of where power lay in China extremely important for the Soviet Union. Kitai (China, Siniakova 1931) shows images of Chinese people at work, later at war. The text expresses hope that the workers will be victorious, making a better future possible. In this picturebook there is no suggestion of a leading role for the Soviet Union. Advocacy of such a role is to be found to some extent in the already mentioned picturebooks about international Pioneer gatherings. In O shesterych vot ėtich (Take a Look at these Six, Rudakov 1926), which is subtitled “Skazka o Komintern” (A Tale of the Comintern), the opening images are of six boys. Each is sitting behind his respective boundary post and tucking into his “typical” national food: Jean, from France, has a small RUSSIAN PICTUREBOOKS FROM 1922 TO 1934: MODERNIZATION, SENSE ... 207 pastry; John, from England, a large steak; the Russian, Gavriushka, a slice of bread; the Chinese boy is drinking tea. Only Tom, the black boy, has nothing to eat but mustard. Their encounters lead to fisticuffs—until the appearance on the scene one day of the “Comintern,” personified by a strong worker with a red flag. He teaches them friendship and the advantages of peaceful coexistence. They share their food, burn the posts, and learn how much better life is without fighting. The national stereotypes underline the boys’ differences, which in turn make their fraternization more meritorious. In Dzin’-Fu-Fun (Voronetskii 1926) a burly, cheerful sailor from the ship Komsomolets (Young Communist) becomes a savior figure. He rescues two little Chinese street urchins from maltreatment and hunger on the streets and conveys them to his homeland, where they are welcomed and loved, and can attend school. A year later they return to their native land, where they will rally their friends to the revolutionary struggle. In other picturebooks, the leadership aspiration becomes the actual mission. An early example is Mai i Oktiabrina (Orlov 1924), in which the protagonists, symbolically named May (female name derived from May 1st, the International Workers’ Day) and Octobrina (female name, derived from the October Revolution), dream that an airplane is taking them to Africa, India, and Japan. They behold naked Africans, half-naked Indians, and Japanese children in lovely traditional clothing hard at work, together with the usual adversary figures, the capitalists and the colonial military. In India and Japan, May and Octobrina address the children, agitating for revolution so that their audience too may experience freedom and joy. The black-and-white linocuts follow the style of political posters, and the figures are overdrawn; the Africans are complete caricatures. The air journey combines modernization fervor with political mission. In Vania v Kitae (Vanya in China, Kalinichenko 1927), Vanya flies to China in a dream and offers solidarity to the Chinese revolutionaries. Jimmy Joy in Dzhimmi Dzhoi v gosti k pioneram (Jimmy Joy Visits the Pioneers, Kustodiev 1926)isfished out of the ocean by a Soviet aircraft during his travels, by the most adventurous means possible, from the United States to the Promised Land of the Pioneers. As Evgeny Shteiner rightly notes, these and other “mission tales” can be read as adventure stories, substitutes for the now frowned-on fantasy adventure tales of earlier times (2002, 130). The heroes gain stature from the political mission entrusted to them, and some of the stories can claim a measure of realism in their content. 208 V. RUTSCHMANN

No such aspiration can be credited to Detki raznotsvetki (Children of Different Color, Chekhonin 1927). The author takes advantage of the popular motif of the airplane journey to produce an utterly implau- sible tale. The hero, a boy called Vanya, decides to undertake an air journey to distant lands about which he has heard wonderful things. He touches down in Mumbai and comes across a naked, weeping African. Surprised, Vanya reﬂects, “Seeing there’s a black boy here, it would be rather nice to meet a red-skinned one as well,” whereupon a “Red Indian” appears, complete with feather headdress. Next along is a yellow Chinese boy wearing a conical hat. Vanya now “orders” a blue boy and is informed by the Indian that there are only four colors. The tale ends with all four munching bananas together. Detki raznotsvetki is patently a surrealist story, parodying the kind of “mission tale” already described. This attittude also explains the grotesque drawings of the boys, which Sergei Chekhonin, who had a reputation for design, evidently much enjoyed executing.

THE END FOR THE NEW PICTUREBOOKS During the period under review, new images were initially produced for the members of a post-revolutionary society. The characters exude self-confidence and actively participate in the economic and cultural construction of society. The pictures show a modern, industrialized world; specifically Russian items are almost totally absent. The non- Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union are characterized by their traditional dress but are perceived as members of the new society, particularly when shown in the context of work. Increasing political mobilization made stereotypes more important also for the Russian self-image; the red scarf and the budenovka become attributes of all Soviet children. The children no longer move about independently in the city or in the countryside but are now part of Pioneer groups. The old stereotypes—capitalists, exploiters, clergy—were deployed with renewed vigor from 1930 on, appearing now in picturebooks about the civil war (Kurdov 1931) or about Central Asian regions that had not yet been finally “sovietized” (Ermolaeva 1931). The old pattern of the Christian mission tale was adapted to proclaim the message of social justice and happiness in the Soviet Union. Folkloric stereotypes of the various Soviet nationalities were still used, but only as indicators RUSSIAN PICTUREBOOKS FROM 1922 TO 1934: MODERNIZATION, SENSE ... 209

Fig. 10.6 Illustration by Mikhail Tsekhanovski from Samuil Marshak, Pochta (The Postal Service) 5th ed. (Leningrad: Raduga, 1930). Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library 210 V. RUTSCHMANN of the ethnic diversity within the Soviet Union, which in turn served mainly to underscore the country’s geographical vastness. Internationalism was replaced, if at all, by “one nation globalisation” (Kelly 2003, 20), but the image that came to dominate the scene was that of defensive readiness. In 1927, Samuil Marshak and Mikhail Tsekhanovski published Pochta (The Postal Service), the story of a letter addressed to the author Boris Zhitkov that follows him round the world (Fig. 10.6). From Berlin to London to Brazil, postmen try in vain to deliver the letter, narrowly missing Zhitkov each time. Once he returns to Leningrad, his travels are over, and his Leningrad postman hands over the letter. The various postmen are stereotyped by indicative clothing (or, in the German’s case, by a beer belly); additionally, silhouettes of the cities featured (or of palms in the Brazil episode) suggest the respective countries. This cheerfully open-armed attitude toward the world at large was to vanish from picturebooks during the 1930s, along with the eager internationalism. The self-image newly created in the 1920s for the Soviet child, cheerful and self-reliant, was reworked into the cheerful, disciplined, defense-trained Pioneer wearing the budenovka. Modernization was overtaken and overlaid by political mobilization. Toward the end of the period under study, and concurrent with the last remaining inﬂuences from Modernism in art, the genre of the colored picturebook that gave equal weight to text and illustration (Gankina 1977) disappeared from the scene. Its place was taken by texts, many of them from classical literature, with black-and-white illustrations. These conformed to the post-1934 prescriptions of Socialist Realism. The brief heyday of the Russian picturebook for children was over.

NOTES 1. It was not possible to extend the scope of this chapter to include picturebooks in the languages of the Soviet Union’s cultural minorities. 2. Schoolchildren aged seven to nine were organized into groups of oktiab- riata (Octobrists, sing. oktiabrenok) before moving on to enroll in the Pioneers. 3. Marina Nikolaeva’s observation that the headscarf tied at the back is a mark of the modern working woman, while tying at the front indicates unprogressive attitudes, also applies to representations in picturebooks (2007,40–1). RUSSIAN PICTUREBOOKS FROM 1922 TO 1934: MODERNIZATION, SENSE ... 211

REFERENCES

Primary Sources (Illustrator’s name ﬁrst) Adlivankin, S. [1927]. Riksha iz Shankhaia. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia. Adlivankin, S., and N. Agnivtsev (text). [1926]. Malen’kii chernyii Murzuk. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia. Beliakov, N., and V. Kardashev. 1931. Iunii politekhnik. Vyp. 5: Zhilishche. Moscow, Leningrad: Krasnyj proletarii. Boim, S., B. Sukhanov, and G. Ryklin (text). 1931. Evreiskii Kolkhoz. Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia. Bonch-Osmolovskaia, O. 1928. Raznotsvetnye rebiata. Moscow: Raduga. Borisov, A. 1929. Devochki SSSR. Leningrad: Gos. izd. Borovskaia, A., A. Barto, and O. Gur’ian (text). 1926. Prazdnik. Moscow: Rabochaia Moskva. Borovskaia, A., L. Eliseevnina, and M. Ruderman (text). 1933. Severnyi mai. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia. Bruni, L. 1931. Nashi tropiki. Moscow, Leningrad: GIZ. Chekhonin, S., and S. Poltavskii (text). 1927. Detki raznotsvetki. Moscow: ZIF. Chichagova, G., O. Chichagova, and N. Smirnov (text). 1926. Detjam o gazete. Moscow, Leningrad: Gosizdat. Deineka, A., and A. Barto (text). 1928. Pervoe Maia. Moscow: Gos. izd. Deineko, O., and N. Troshin. 1930. Khlebozavod No 3. Moscow: Gos. izd. Deineko, O., and N. Troshin. 1931. Ot Kauchuka do kaloshi. Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia. Echeistov, G., and A. Barto (text). 1929. Bratishki. Moscow: GIZ. Echeistov, G., and Y. Gralitsa (text). 1926. Detskii internatsional. Moscow: Gos. izd. Ermolaeva, V., and A. Vvedenskii (text). 1931. Podvig pionera Mochina. Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia. Ėvenbakh, E., and B. Zhitkov (text). 1926. Stol. Moscow: GIZ. Ganf, J., and E. Tarakhovskaia (text). 1925. O tom kak priekhal shokolad v Mossel’prom. Moscow: Druz’ia detei. Glebova, T., and K. Vysokovskii. 1930. Ekhali rebiata. Moscow: Gos. izd. Goncharov, A., and N. Sher. 1932. Dzhanik i Kiriusha. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia. Iakobson, A., and E. Shvarts (text). 1931. Buriatiia. Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia. Ianchevskii, N. 1927. Skaz pro Severnyi Kavkaz. Rostov-na-Donu: Sevkavkniga. Ivanova, V., and E. Tarakhovskaia (text). 1932. Bei v baraban. Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia. Kachkacheva, T., and S. Zak (text). [1926]. Kak Pasha provel 1oe Maia. Moscow: Novaia Moskva. 212 V. RUTSCHMANN

Kalinichenko, A., and G. Shaposhnikov (text). 1927. Vania v Kitae. Rostov-na- Donu: Sev. Kavkaz. Kashina, N. 1931. Deti vostochnykh kolkhozov. Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia. Kashina, N., and E. Tarakovskaia (text). 1932. Amare detskii sad. Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia. Kisil’, I., and O. Steshenko (text). [1929]. Chai. Kiev: Kul’tura. Konashevich, V., and V. Mirovich (text). 1926. Nasha ulitsa. Leningrad, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izd. Kozlovaia, K., and I. Polianskaia (text). 1931. Poezd v Kazakhstan. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia. Kupreianov, N., and V. Maiakovskii (text). 1925. Skazka o Pete, tolstom rebenke, i o Sime, kotoryi tonkii. Moscow: Moskovskii Rabochii. Kurdov, V., and A. Vvedenskii (text). 1931. Konnaia Budennogo. Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia. Kustodiev, B., and L. Lesnaia (text). 1926. Dzhimmi Dzhoi v gosti k pioneram. Leningrad: Raduga. Lebedev, V., and S. Marshak (text). 1925a. Morozhenoe. Leningrad: Raduga. Lebedev, V., and S. Marshak (text). 1925b. Vchera i segodnia. Leningrad: Raduga. Maliutin, I., and N. Agnivtsev (text). 1925. Oktiabrenok postrelenok. Moscow: Oktiabrenok. Mal’t, S., and N. Agnivtsev (text). 1925. Voina igrushek. Moscow: Druz’ia detei. Manuilov, A., and B. Shatilov (text). 1929. Khlopok. Moscow: Mirimanov. Orlov, V., and L. Zilov (text). 1924. Mai i Oktiabrina. Moscow: Mospoligraf. Pakhomov, A. 1927. Leto. Moscow: GIZ. Popova, L., and Ė. Ėmden (text). 1930. Skazka o tolstom shutsmane i ob uchenom doktore. Moscow: Gosizdat. Popova, L., A. Petrova, G. Tuganov, and N. Vengrov (text). 1927. Oktiabr’skie pesenki. Moscow, Leningrad: Gos. izd. Rankov, M., and E. Rodova (text). 1931. Turkestanskii khlopok. Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia. Rudakov, K., and A. Agnivtsev (text). 1926. O shesterykh vot etikh. Moscow, Leningrad: Kniga. Shifrin, N., and V. Maiakovskii (text). 1930. Kem byt’? Moscow: GIZ. Shterenberg, D., and Ė. Ėmden (text). 1930a. Pesnia o Mame. Moscow: GIZ. Shterenberg, D., and A. Mariengof (text). 1930b. Bobka ﬁzkul’turnik.Moscow:GIZ. Siniakova, M. 1931. Kitai. Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia. Tsekhanovski, M., and S. Marshak (text). 1930 [ﬁrst edition 1927]. Pochta. Leningrad: Raduga. Vatagin, V., and M. Ezuchevskii. 1928. Deti narodov S.S.S.R. Moscow: Mirimanov. Vatagin, V., M. Ezuchevskii, and A. Solodovnikov (text). 1929a. Deti Kitaia. Moscow: Mirimanov. RUSSIAN PICTUREBOOKS FROM 1922 TO 1934: MODERNIZATION, SENSE ... 213

Vatagin, V., M. Ezuchevskii, and A. Solodovnikov (text). 1929b. Deti Negrov. Moscow: Mirimanov. Vatagin, V., M. Ezuchevskii, and A. Solodovnikov (text). 1929c. Iaponskie deti. Moscow: Mirimanov. Voronetskii, A., and N. Iakovlev (text). 1926. Dzin’-Fu-Fun: Dlia oktiabriat pro kitaichat. Rostov-Don: Sevkavkniga.

Secondary Sources Balina, M. 2008. Creativity Through Restraint. In Russian Children’s Literature and Culture, ed. M. Balina and L. Rudova, 1–17. New York, London: Routledge. Belov, S. V. 1978. L. M. Kliachko i izdatel’stvo “Raduga”: U istokov sovetskoi detskoi knigi. In Voprosy istorii sovetskoi knigi i bibliographii, ed. I. I. Frolova and M. V. Mashkova, 21–35. Leningrad: GPB. Blinov, V. 2009. Russkaia detskaia knizhka-kartinka 1900–1941. Moscow: “Iskusstvo XXI vek.” Gankina, E. 1977. Khudozhnik v sovremennoi detskoi knige. Moscow: Sovetskii Khudozhnik. Kappeler, A. 2001. Russland als Vielvölkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall. München: Beck. Kelly, C. 2003. The Little Citizens of a Big Country: Childhood and International Relations in the Soviet Union. Trondheim: Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Kelly, C. 2007. Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Marinelli-König, G. 2007. Russische Kinderliteratur in der Sowjetunion der Jahre 1920–1930. München: Otto Sagner. Nikolaeva, M. 2007. “Der Kapitalist” und “der Intellektuelle”: Die Dynamik der Kulturstereotype und ihre Sichtbarmachung in den Sowjetplakaten der Zwischenkriegszeit. In Selbstbilder—Fremdbilder—Nationenbilder, ed. J. Wedl et al., 19–43. Berlin: LIT. Offord, D. 1998. Lichnost: Notions of Individual Identity. In Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1881–1940, ed. C. Kelly and D. Shepherd, 13–25. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Shteiner, E. 2002. Avangard i postroenie novogo cheloveka: Iskusstvo sovetskoi detskoi knigi 1920-kh godov. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Suny, R. G., and T. Martin (eds.). 2001. A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 214 V. RUTSCHMANN

Verena Rutschmann studied Slavistics and Eastern European history in Zurich, Switzerland, graduating with a study of girl’s ﬁction in the Soviet Union. Her PhD in European popular literature, published as Fortschritt und Freiheit: Nationale Tugenden in historischen Jugendbüchern der Schweiz seit 1880 (Chronos, 1994), addressed representations of national identity and cultural diversity in Swiss children’s books. She worked at the Swiss Institute of Children’s Literature from 1975 until 2009, and from 2001 she was Director of its research department and of the Johanna Spyri Archives. Her interest in Russian picturebooks for children focuses on images of cultural identity. CHAPTER 11

Appropriating the “Wild North”: The Image of Canada and Its Exploitation in German Children’s Literature

Martina Seifert

When it comes to the imaginary, nothing seems more misleading than the popular assumption that our imagination can actually “run wild.” Instead, the routes it follows are determined by social and cultural production, by concepts and images we have internalized and hardly ever excogitate. Our childhood reading, especially, provides us with a whole range of images, among them images of self and other, of home and away. As cultural artifacts designed for the socialization process, as a prime medium of enculturation, and, last but not least, as a medium for the yearnings and nostalgic projections of adults, children’s literature, more so than general literature, delivers what Mary Rubio calls “an x-ray vision into the perceptual frameworks” held by those who produce it (1994, 229). As an archive of culture, children’sliteratureisofparticular interest to the imagologist, who tries to analyze “the complex links between literary discourse on the one hand and national identity-constructs on the other” (Leerssen 2000,270). A particularly striking and unambiguous example of these links—that is, of the relationship between autoimages and heteroimages—is provided by

M. Seifert (*) Gymnasium Bleckede, Bleckede, Germany

© The Author(s) 2017 215 E. O’Sullivan, A. Immel (eds.), Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8_11 216 M. SEIFERT a longitudinal study of the place of Canada in German children’s literature from the mid-nineteenth century until the millennium.1 More than 500 texts by German authors and about the same number of translations were analyzed to trace the genesis, development, and various appropriations of the Canadian image in the context of culturally and historically changing German self-images. The project provided a fascinating insight into the possible homogeneity of intercultural discourse and the striking solidity and perpetuity, if not immutability, that images can acquire. It also revealed how a single image can be subjected to a variety of interpretations and appropriations over time, depending on the changing needs and self- images of the producing culture. To demonstrate these mechanisms, this chapter—after a brief, albeit indispensable, introduction to the German perception and representation of Canada—examines three con- secutive eras of German history and their respective appropriations of prevailing images of Canada: the ﬁrst third of the twentieth century; the time of National Socialism (1933–1945), which will be the main focus; and the 1950s postwar period. These periods have been selected because they provide particularly striking demonstrations of the phenomena mentioned above.

GERMAN IMAGES OF CANADA On a German mental map of sameness and difference, Canada unambigu- ously occupies the the place of the eternal “other” (see Seifert 2005, 2007). Projected as an endless northern wilderness, Canada has been constructed as the ultimate counterimage to a primarily negative German self-image of an overcrowded, urban, heavily industrialized, pol- luted, and, with regard to individual freedom, overly restrictive homeland. In contrast, Canada has been mapped out as spacious to the point of being unpopulated, full of freedom and adventure, a place where one can live independently and far from the constraints of culture. Popular discourse on Canada invariably resorts to a diction of “endlessness,”“emptiness,” “distance from civilization,”“virginity,”“nordicity,” and, last but not least, “wilderness.” Consequently, contact with representatives of the wilderness, in particular bears and wolves, is imperative in German juvenile novels set in Canada. That these images of a non-urban, non-industrialized, unpopulated, and unspoiled wilderness paradise do not correspond with Canadian reality needs no comment. Besides, within the constructivist approach of APPROPRIATING THE “WILD NORTH”: THE IMAGE OF CANADA ... 217 modern image studies, or imagology, the relation of images to empirical reality is of little or no interest. Instead of their “truth value,” their “recognition value” (Leerssen 2000, 280) is examined, because the power and the dissemination of the images do not depend on their veracity. Images are understood as intertextual and intermedial constructs, embedded in a network of persistent, often time-honored discourses (see Neumann 2009, 62), and “the conventions and commonplaces inherited from a pre-existing textual tradition fully overshadow the experience of reality” (Leerssen 2003). In the present case, the time-honored dichoto- mies of “civilization versus nature” and “center and periphery,” along with their corresponding discourses, primarily determine the projection: Canada is consistently equated with “nature” and located outside of civilization, at the outer edge of the modern world. German books place Canada “North of Nowhere,”“Behind the Last Fringes of the World,” “Where All Streets End,” or “Where the World Ends.”2 This positioning bears little relation to actual geography but is the result of a mental mapping process that situates Canada as far away as possible from where Germans place themselves. Viewed positively and nostalgically, this “periphery” is imagined as authentic, true, and unspoiled by cultural progress. Images of Canada are escapist and always positive, thus presenting a perfect example of whatcanbecalleda“collective topophilia” (Tabbert 1995,138). These images derived from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European world-weariness and became manifested in a genre that, significantly, accounts for the absolute majority of German texts featuring Canada: the adventure story. No other foreign nation seems to be more closely tied to one specific genre in German children’s literature. The adventure story’s wilderness setting and cast of characters determined the German image of Canada. From the myriad of self-proclaimed “adven- turers,” hunters, trappers, prospectors, and lumberjacks to the French coureurs de bois and voyageurs to the iconic Mounties, the typical Canadian is a backwoodsman. At least in German literature, Canada remains a “country without women,” as the title of Fred Larsen’s 1960 adventure story proclaimed. Since the very beginnings of this literary discourse, German authors of fiction set in Canada, themselves primarily male, have been constructing Canada as a “country of men” and suitable for men only. The protagonists are almost invariably male, the imagined audience is male—although these texts were, as empirical research has proven, avidly read by girls as well—and even women writers refer to Canada as “the country of men” (Ott 1954, 106). In this male territory, 218 M. SEIFERT this refuge of true masculinity, “men can still be men” (Larsen 1960, 273), unaffected by the crisis of masculinity—another core image compo- nent that fuels the popularity of this construct. Given the unambiguous discourse of masculinity, the depiction of Canada provides an impressive example of gender-specific topographies as well as the gendering of national images.

THE GENESIS OF GERMAN IMAGES OF CANADA For many Germans, childhood reading shaped their mental map of Canada. Men who nowadays publish coffee-table books about Canada’s wilderness or tour Germany with highly successful multimedia shows about their canoe or raft trips on the Mackenzie River often explicitly refer to their boyhood reading, as does Dieter Kreutzkamp: “The Canada fever inside me dates back to the first time I buried myself in the Leatherstocking Tales or the weighty tomes of Karl May” (1989, 7).3 Strangely enough however, Karl May, Germany’s most prominent and bestselling author of popular adventure fiction in the Wilhelminian Era (1871–1918), never set any of his famous adventure stories in Canada.4 But even though he and most of his contemporaries placed their fiction in the United States, particularly in the American West, it is still thanks to them that Canada remains the German boyhood dream par excellence. To understand this phenomenon, the German mindset in the second half of the nineteenth century needs to be highlighted. After the unification of Germany in 1871, Germans experienced a period of unprecedented, hectic, and massive industrialization, mechanization, and economic expansion, especially in the field of heavy industry. Having become Europe’s leading steel producer in the 1890s, as well as the world leader in the chemical industry, the German Empire was runner-up to the United States in the world rankings of industrial nations in 1913. At the same time, Germans had to adapt to the reality of unparalleled urban sprawl and the fast and colossal destruction of nature. These drastic changes brought about an increasing social and cultural alienation of the individual, asevere“cultural neurosis” (Dupke 1994, 310), causing a wave of escapist dynamics, such as diverse back-to-nature movements (e.g. Lebensreform [life reform], organic farming, vegetarianism, naturalism, artist colonies and dropout communes, the youth movement, etc.). These anti-urban movements, which identified the city as evil, were paralleled by an unprecedented boom in adventure fiction, with its exotic (non-urban) settings, as a medium APPROPRIATING THE “WILD NORTH”: THE IMAGE OF CANADA ... 219 of compensation (see e.g. Becker 2000). Readers longed to escape from the industrialized, capitalist, and atomistic society that Germany had so swiftly become, a desire that May and other giants of adventure fiction, such as Friedrich Gerstäcker, Balduin Möllhausen, Armand (pseudonym of Friedrich Armand Strubberg), Otto Ruppius, and Friedrich J. Pajeken, fulfilled. Yet, even though these authors still turned primarily to the United States for their adventurous inspiration, the image of that country was becoming more and more ambiguous within German discourse. The United States had long been a utopian anchor in German literature (see Durzak 1977, 538ff). Within this New World mythology, the continent served as a tabula rasa,afield of projection for exoticist and escapist longings, and thus a magnificent counterimage. Mapped out as a paradise of political, religious, and, most importantly, individual freedom, the United States promised salvation from the ills of European civilization, a pristine, sublime nature retreat for the ailing German soul. Despite some ambivalence, a primarily positive projection prevailed until the mid-1880s. Around that time, however, the United States became “a paradigm of modern civilization” (Goetsch 1983, 121)—that is, urbanized, imperia- listic, materialistic, and corrupt, a nightmare of technology and greed (see Boerner 1975, 315; Diner 2002,42–3)—and thus an epitome, if not causal agent, of the alienation of the modern individual. This anti- American mentality only grew stronger in Germany after World War I, during the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) (see Diner 2002,40–1).

THE GRAMMAR OF IMAGES:CANADA REPLACES THE UNITED STATES Because the United States no longer satisﬁed the intense anti-modern needs of German discourse, German writers began to look north for their literary exploits. Canada advanced as the substitute territory for romantic wilderness projections, the desperately needed image of a pre- modern sanctuary. Thus the “German ‘myth of Canada’ feeds upon the ‘myth of America’ in complex ways,” as Arnd Bohm recapitulates:

The predominant tone of German literature about the United States has been disappointment at the gap between the utopian ideal of a free, egali- tarian democracy set in a pristine wilderness, and the reality of possessive individualism centred in large, often bleak urban regions. Those ﬁctional characters who do escape to rural areas end up in harsh, incomprehensible 220 M. SEIFERT

zones of monotony, rather than in a comforting pastoral world. Pushing off against such negative projections, “Canada” became the space where nature and civilization might yet be harmonized in a “new world.” (2000,6)

Joep Leerssen describes this phenomenon in the context of what he deﬁnes as the “grammar of images” (2000, 271), a concept that explores the dynamic nature of national rhetoric in which players, agents, and targets can shift or be substituted according to changing cultural contexts. In this case, images projected in adventure stories set in the United States were simply transplanted north, along with the myth of the Western Frontier. Such a transfer was aided by similar points of reference, real and imaginary, between the United States and Canada: vast open prairies, dense forests, lofty mountain ranges, an indigenous population, and wild animals. By the mid-1880s, however, the American frontier was closed and could only be restaged, nostalgically, as a setting of the past. In 1921, Emil Droonberg, a German author who published several adventure stories set in Canada that were reprinted in the 1950s and 1960s, lamented the death of what had been so dear to Germans for almost a century: “American Romance,” with its solitary, survivalist “Leatherstocking” ﬁg- ures. Adventure stories set in the United States, he claimed,

now have to wear a ‘once-upon-a-time’ label ... Where once the Indian scout paddled his canoe, and the pathﬁnder made his way ..., where once drops of dew were sparkling like diamonds in the sunshine, now tired, dirty, destitute slaves of industry make their way to dismal factory barracks ... (1921, 298)

There was no reason to despair, however, because the desolate German reader could escape to

Canada! Alaska! —Places of Northland wonders! ... Places of grimmest backwoods reality, ... where the lonesome settler in his log cabin, hears nothing but the cracking sound of caribou legs moving by. It is here that one can still meet the Indians and trappers, prospectors and cowboys, hunters and backwoods farmers ... American Romance is not dead, and it won’t be for a long time. It has only changed locales, has withdrawn to the north ... (ibid.)

How the “grammar of images” works as a kind of natural passage, eluci- dated here by Droonberg’s personiﬁcation of “American Romance,” is APPROPRIATING THE “WILD NORTH”: THE IMAGE OF CANADA ... 221 very clear: the Canadian North has taken the place of the American West. Colin Ross, a German author of highly successful geopolitical ﬁction, openly declares this—for him inevitable—changeover:

The Wild West is gone, but there is the Wild North. This is an even tougher territory than the Wild West, but also more attractive for the daring and, without doubt, the only place left in the world that still offers a bit of the old Wild West freedom and romance. (1934, 272)

CANADA IN GERMAN JUVENILE FICTION IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY As a setting for juvenile novels, Canada instantly increased in popularity in the aftermath of the Klondike Gold Rush (1896–1899), which provided a most welcome subject matter for German authors. In addition, the first translations of Canadian wild animal stories by Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G. D. Roberts, published from 1899 onward, became instant bestsellers.5 With their Canadian wilderness settings and advocacy of harsh Darwinian principles, they received passionate reviews and were placed on the major recommended reading lists for the young. By 1923 over a million books by Seton had been sold; they were praised for their authenticity, especially for the author’s personal hunting and trapping experience in “the Canadian virgin forests.” Roberts, the worldly “Father of Canadian Poetry” and “Dean of Canadian Letters,” was likewise celebrated by German reviewers as a “hunter, backwoodsman, animal lover and nature worshipper,” and as “a poet from the boondocks and the prairies,” a description that shows how the perception of the recipients is predeter- mined by the images. Seton’s and Roberts’s texts, together with those produced by German authors depicting Canada as an unparalleled wilderness setting, offered an anti-modern frame of mind that helped alleviate the anxieties of the fin-de-siècle period. The myth of the Canadian North became fixed in the German mind with the translation of Jack London’s animal story, Call of the Wild,in 1907, which resonated with the working masses and led to an enthusiastic reception of London’s other Yukon stories in the early 1920s. With the back-to-nature movements at their height, texts set in the Canadian wilderness spoke to the zeitgeist of culture critique, urban fatigue, technopho- bia, and rediscovery of the archaic, primitive, and instinctual. The 222 M. SEIFERT

Canadian setting was hailed as “true,”“transparent,”“unspoiled,” and, most importantly, “free.” In the Weimar Republic, Canada was celebrated as the premier northern wilderness paradise, where an adventure playground awaited male adolescents longing to escape the ills of civilized life in Germany.

APPROPRIATION OF CANADA BY THE NATIONAL SOCIALISTS After the electoral triumph of the National Socialists in 1933, the gloriﬁed image of Canada was bound to be rejected by the gatekeepers of children’s literature, along with the adventure story genre that had popularized it. A medium of compensation and escapism, the genre promoted individualism instead of collectivism, romantic rapture instead of self-control, and longing for the faraway instead of dedication to national concerns. Moreover, it featured protagonists who regarded the homeland as deﬁ- cient, a place to leave behind. Such values and heroes were unacceptable to National Socialism. One writer in the country’s leading journal for teachers complained that these heroes

know only external danger, ungainly adventures for adventure’s sake. They do not know the conﬂict of duties, the true tragedy, the struggle between inclination and duty, willpower, the victory over oneself which ennobles the true hero. The true hero is always in service of a great idea, a community, a national task. (Müller 1939, 71)

Between 1935 and 1939, however, 226 issues of a pulp fiction series entitled Alaska Jim: A Hero of the Canadian Police were published, featuring Jim Hoover, alias “Alaska Jim,” a hunter and trapper who, according to the blurb, supported the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in its “hard and merciless fight against crime in northwest Canada,” but nevertheless roamed the northern wilderness like any other adventurer. How could such a series have been published? Despite its attempts to control what Germans could read—from the Ausmerzung (the eradication of “undesirable” literature, including a third of all library holdings) to publication bans, to the various lists of books either recommended or rejected—the National Socialist (NS) government only partially achieved its goal. The capitalist structures of the book market remained almost untouched (see Nassen 1987, 38), and adventure fiction continued to enthrall adolescents despite bitter attacks and censorship activities (ibid. 12–13). APPROPRIATING THE “WILD NORTH”: THE IMAGE OF CANADA ... 223

Given the impossibility of preventing adventure fiction from flooding the market, let alone diminishing its popularity, the NS Schrifttumswalter, the commissioners of the literary system, attempted to appropriate the genre as well as the popular image of Canada for their own ideological agenda. Thus, in 1939, the Canadian protagonist in the Alaska Jim series was replaced by a German called Rolf Rauhaar ([rough hair], which also happens to be the name of a breed of hunting dog), alias Rolf Kraft (strength/power), inte- grating via his name Aryan heroic concepts. The series was renamed Stürmvögel (Storm Birds), and eighty-two issues—interspersed with NS propaganda, particularly anti-Semitism—were published until 1941. Examples of adventure texts repurposed for the NS agenda abound. Some were altered, given new prefaces and epilogues; for others, new blurbs were written or marketing and reviewing strategies changed. The genre of the adventure story was, in many respects, highly compatible with NS ideology; in particular, there were striking similarities with regard to nationalist, colonialist, racial, and gender discourses. The genre’s critique of culture and demonization of urbanity, along with its anti-industrial and anti-bourgeois position, could be absorbed easily, as could its immanent concepts of performance, heroic struggle, and manliness. Thus the exclusion of the female also persisted, as the Aryan woman wassupposedtostayathometofulfill her “biological fate” of reproduction and motherhood. Stories set in Canada also resonated with NS ideology because of the emphasis on spaciousness and nordicity. Germany was characterized as a Volk ohne Raum, a people without space, a concept promulgated to anticipate and legitimate the upcoming war, whereas Canada was perceived as a highly desirable Raum ohne Volk, a space without people. Colin Ross openly expressed this ideology when he praised Canada as an “empty space ready to take up superfluous people and superfluous energies” (1934, 14). This allegedly “empty,”“unused” territory was now claimed as the new Germanic Lebensraum because Canadians, according to German author Werner von Grünau, were totally incapable of compre- hending it, let alone using it (1937, 17). The concept of “nordicity,” an enthusiastic projection of passionate longing prevalent in German discourse since the late eighteenth century that idealized northern Europe as a precapitalist idyll, also came into play during this era. Canada was branded a “Nordic country,” in explicit contrast to the UnitedStates,andintegratedintoa nationalistic, neo-Romantic revaluation of the “Nordic” nations, the 224 M. SEIFERT

“Nordic” landscape, and the “Nordic” hero. With the increasing hostility toward the United States from the mid-1930s and the ban- ning of the American West from publication topics from 1939 onward (see Gassert 1997), Canada became even more firmly established as a substitute frontier. All these constructed affinities increased Canada’s popularity, as did the stereotypical masculinity associated with it. In Canada, as Droonberg had claimed in the 1920s, one could still find these “glorious types of tough, robust, elemental manliness, who make much better role models for coming generations than the ambivalent, dreamy, indolent and spineless characters found so often in the novels of our modernists” (1921, 300). Such anti-modernist, anti-capitalist, and masculinist discourses closely complemented concepts of heroism approved by NS ideology, as did other ideas deeply rooted in German texts about Canada, such as its alleged authenticity, realism, pragma- tism, and complete absence of irony or parody.

CANADA AS THE FORGE FOR “HEALTHY HUMAN MATERIAL” One central aspect of the Canada discourse that National Socialism could not appropriate was escapism. Essentialist concepts of “homeland” or “blood and soil” did not allow for such projections, so in the texts produced between 1933 and 1945, Canada served as an interlude in the German hero’s biography, a preliminary battlefield that prepares young males for their eventual re-entry into German society as soldiers. Adventures there facilitate the acquisition of basic qualifications for service to the German nation and its people (Hopster 2001, 526). The former adventure playground was reimagined as a training ground and testing arena for discipline, unquestioning obedience, and the so-called masculine virtues of strength, willpower, courage, perseverance, mercilessness, and determination. Where else but in Canada—or, more precisely, the German construct of Canada—could such qualities best be developed? There, according to German authors, the “laws of the survival of the fittest still reign with pitiless rigidity” (Droonberg 1921, 298). Consequently, nature was portrayed as threatening and hostile, uncaring and relentless, the best teacher in the battle for survival, a characterization that also reflected the social Darwinism at the base of NS politics. This emphasis on all the world as in a constant state of war clearly served to stimulate, as Ulrich Nassen observes, “a mentality of annexation and revenge” in young readers (1987, 108). APPROPRIATING THE “WILD NORTH”: THE IMAGE OF CANADA ... 225

In this “endlessly rough and harsh land” (Huber 1937, 37), one is “far from any shelter ... in the midst of a relentless space” (Strenger 1942, 384). Authors indulged in the invention of extreme climatic challenges, piling on blizzards and bitter cold. To the question of who could survive such adverse conditions, there was only one answer: “a hard, healthy and heroic breed of men,”“strong natured,”“brave and courageous” (Huber 1937, 149; Kipp 1943a, 6), who “despise self- pity,”“manfully suppress any pain” (Riedel 1943,157),andknowno fear. Here “one has to command respect,” here all “limp thoughts evaporate” (Kipp 1943a,66),here“one has to stay cold-blooded” (Riedel 1940, 20). Conventional images of Canada converge with the NS program of biological hygiene, because perfect physical health is essential to survival: “This is no place for weaklings and sissies,” warns Friedrich Kipp (1938, 107). Canada bred no “dreamy stay-at-homes and pale-faced bookworms, but real wholesome men,” according to Hans Schemm (1933, 1), founder of the National Socialist Teachers’ Federation and “Leader of Cultural and Educational Affairs of Bavaria.” Even translations of novels by Canadian authors were fashioned to be consistent with this ideological agenda. Men of the Last Frontier (1931), a novel by self-constructed native Canadian Grey Owl (pseudonym of Archibald Stansfeld Belaney), was translated in 1936 and featured on all of the lists of approved literature for the young. Reviewers read the text as supporting the idea that “[o]nly those who have adventure mixed fatefully into their blood can survive such hardship.”6 In fact, translator Käte Freinthal strove to bring the source text’s comparatively gentle view of nature closer to NS literary discourse by molding it into the “man against the elements” topos and using diction specific to NS cultural authorities. Thus, “the bitter contest” ofthemen(GreyOwl1999,7)becamedieser harte erbitterte Kampf (this hard and bitter battle) (1937, 30). Where Grey Owl describes the men of the north “bequeathing something of their courage, self-sacrifice, and devotion to a cause, to those who follow” (1999, 24), the translator expanded the phrase with wie eine bren- nende Fackel [weiterreichen] ([passed on] like a burning torch) (1937, 31). The addition of fire symbolism enhanced the source text’scon- vergence with NS imagery. Significantly, these added phrases were taken out in the postwar edition. The alleged autobiography of another self-constructed Canadian aboriginal, Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, was translated in 1935 226 M. SEIFERT and republished in 1944, an astounding exception at a time when publishing activities were extremely limited and practically non-existent for translations from English. Detailed descriptions of the cruel educational methods inflicted upon the boys during their warrior training, such as daily beatings and icy morning baths to harden their bodies, as well as brutal tests of courage (see Long Lance 1925), fit flawlessly with NS ideology, which regarded the human body as “material” in need of being formed. Accordingly, the adventure novelist Georg Leichner hailed the Canadian wilderness as the perfect forge for shaping “healthy human material” (1933, 118). Other authors idealized it as a breeding ground for a tough, virile, and ruthless Aryan race, with some going so far as to equate the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with the Gestapo. Privations experienced in the Canadian wilderness are turned to the purpose of developing self-discipline: Canada “forges a character tough as iron” (Kipp 1943b, 52). In Robert Kraus’s adventure story Freibeuter unter dem Nordlicht (Freebooters under the Northern Lights, 1935), cowardly and romantic Walter hardens under the tutorship of a relentless trapper in Canada, where only “real guys” survive, men “who have the courage to fight snow, ice, frost, starving Natives, voracious wolves and frantic dogs” (10). He learns that true life is brutal and merciless, that feelings should be kept for Sundays, if at all, and that “there is no romance” (126). This plot trajectory represents an explicit rejection of the appropriations of the Canadian image before 1933, which had glorified the “romance” of a free and adventurous life in the Canadian woods. Caution and fear are considered “un-German,” thus the protagonists not only steel their bodies but also train their “callous endurance” (Kraus 1935,87). Unambiguous parallels to NS military training are drawn when Ferdinand Wilkes’s protagonist, Jochen, after struggling with wolves and bears, declares: “Germany needs men who know how to fight. I learned fighting over here” (1937, 212). A description of Armin Otto Huber’s protagonist explains matter-of-factly: “Hisbrothersjoinedthe [German] military to be trained; he himself went to Canada and was drilled there” (1938, 58). Canada as a trial combat zone is illustrated by Hans Wolff von Ponickau in Friedrich Kipp’snovelIn Schnee und Eis (In Snow and Ice, 1938), where the German protagonist is depicted unmistakably as a soldier fighting a snowstorm: he holds his rifle upright and wears a head covering that clearly resembles a German military helmet. APPROPRIATING THE “WILD NORTH”: THE IMAGE OF CANADA ... 227

Fig. 11.1 Illustration by Hans Wolff von Ponickau from Friedrich Kipp, In Schnee und Eis. (Lengerich: Bischof und Klein, 1938)

Adolf Hitler called for “a violent, imperious, intrepid, cruel youth ... able to endure pain” and had a vision of the “free glorious predator flashing from [youths’] eyes once again” (quoted in Kallenbach 1941,31).Inkeepingwith these ideals, the ferocious brutality of life in the Canadian woods was constructed affirmatively. Even the animal stories of the time have to be understood as political texts that legitimized racist ideology and politics that called for extermination of the unhealthy through racial selection, eugenics, and euthanasia. In the fictional Canadian settings, as in NS Germany, the weak, inferior, and genetically impure lose the right to exist and have to be eradi- cated. In Georg Leichner’s story of a disastrous winter expedition to the Canadian North, for example, “The strong can all do it, and the weak ... well, they are no great loss” (1933, 59). In these stories, Germans are destined to be the only legitimate survivors. Even in Otto Boris’sanimalstoryMotu und Miromotu (1937), those who are strong, healthy, and smart prove to be of German origin, except of course for the grizzly and an idealized “Noble Savage”—both of whom, however, are expendable.7 228 M. SEIFERT

The Canadian image was thus readily and effectively absorbed by the National Socialists for a speciﬁc ideological agenda. Within a decade, from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, the instrumentalization of the image had changed. What was formerly a place of regression had become one of aggression; the adventure playground was transformed into a drill ground; and the hymn of boundless individualism was rewritten in praise of self- discipline and unconditional subordination to the national cause.

CANADA IN POSTWAR JUVENILE LITERATURE In 1960, a German biography of the previously mentioned Grey Owl, entitled Der weisse Indianer (The White Indian), was published and immediately nominated for the prestigious German Youth Literature Prize. Its author, Walter Bauer, had migrated to Canada in 1952 in protest at the reindustrialization of postwar West Germany. In Der weisse Indianer he defends Grey Owl’s pretense as an all-too-human desire to reinvent oneself, to redefine one’s identity, to start anew. The motif of a new beginning pervades the text, and Canada is mapped out as a liberating promised land, a counterworld, and, most importantly, a tabula rasa awaiting new inscription, thus giving hope to the desolate German postwar psyche that longed for peace, naturalness, and tranquility (Bauer 1960). The book became an instant bestseller, and Walter Bauer emerged as one of the most famous German-Canadian authors of all time. Bauer’s bestseller is paradigmatic for the postwar instrumentalization of the Canadian image. After having been mapped out by the National Socialists as a military training ground and trial battlefield for a ruthless Aryan race, Canada was quickly projected as a pacifist paradise that could be readily appropriated by a traumatized postwar society for an imaginary “new start.” This drastic reinterpretation of the image immediately after 1945 seems almost ironic and illustrates the immense variety of interpretations and appropriations to which heteroimages can be subjected in the context of culturally and historically changing self-images. Once again, escapist projections dominate: for a devastated postwar Germany bur- dened by its immediate past, Canada becomes a genuine—not only fictional—refuge and site for new beginnings. These yearnings are captured in the telling title of a 1954 German novel set in Canada, Hier fängt die Welt noch einmal an (Here the World Starts Again). An immensely popular fictional setting for young West Germans during the 1950s and 1960s, Canada is reconstructed as the sublime antithesis of Germany: a APPROPRIATING THE “WILD NORTH”: THE IMAGE OF CANADA ... 229 haven of purity, a place allegedly “without history,” and thus, unlike Germany, as Bauer exalts in one of his poems, “without shame/without guilt/without shadow” (Bauer 1957,26–7). New role models for the next generation were needed, and again they were placed in the Canadian wilderness. To avoid dealing with the national past, postwar authors tended to set their novels in faraway places or in the distant past, but postwar novels with a Canadian setting attest to the vitality and stability of a timeless heteroimage. Franz Braumann’s young adult novel Die schwarzen Wasser von Anahim: eine Pionierfamilie findet in den endlosen Wäldern Nordkanadas eine neue Heimat (The Black Waters of Anahim: A Pioneer Family Finds a New Home in the Endless Woodlands of Northern Canada, 1962), which was short-listed for the German Youth Literature Prize, is a typical example of how Canada could serve as a contemporary setting for the traditional freedom and adventure stories. Braumann foregrounds men of energy, strength, and skill who make their way into areas yet untouched by civilization. Although female protagonists start to appear in a number of these texts (including Braumann’snovel), they never enter the wilderness alone and are marginalized in other ways. While the male protagonists thrive, the female characters miss the social life and comfort of the city. They are so frightened, discouraged, and uncom- fortable that they cry incessantly and get into life-threatening situations when they do not listen to their male protectors. The men of the north, however, can master even the most hopeless situations; they are notable for their immaculate behavior, their religious and humane attitudes, and their readiness to help. And who could better personify benefactors of humankind than the true heroes of the north, the scarlet riders? Mountie stories appeared in unprecedented numbers in postwar West Germany. Presented as paragons of decency and ability, impeccable in their manners and actions, the Mounties embody law and order, love animals, and are great comrades and friends in need. Fighting criminals of all kinds, they could be employed by German authors to continue to celebrate glorious male heroes in the Canadian wilderness without being suspected of NS ideology. Doing good deeds in an exotic arena, they restore justice and peace to the world—a much-needed therapy for the German postwar psyche, not just in West Germany but also in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR). Canada enjoyed immense popularity in the GDR, not just enthusiasti- cally consumed by the population—hardly surprising, given the freedom and adventure discourse connected with the time-honored image—but 230 M. SEIFERT also sanctioned by official institutions. The self-appointed “other Germany” had deep sympathies with the “other America,” simply because it was not the United States. Canada was admittedly capitalist, but it practiced a far more acceptable “capitalism with a human face” (Meune 2006, 267). The connection was also rooted in Canada’s colonial history: according to GDR rhetoric, Canada suffered from a double colonization, British and American. The stereotypical Canadian protagonists—the hunters, trappers, backwoodsmen, and lumberjacks—were presented as representatives of a working class cruelly exploited and subjugated primarily by American capitalist criminals. Once again, these positive images of Canada were deployed to criticize not East German society but a third party, the United States. Nevertheless, the constellation of images—Canada as a vast unpopulated wilderness, a territory for men only—remained the same. Numerous examples of further appropriations of this perennial image can be found in contemporary German literature, but can be mentioned only briefly here. In the past four decades, Canada has featured in genres beyond the adventure story, ranging from animal fantasies, detective stories, and teen romances to picturebooks and concept books for the very young. There, too, Canada has remained vital for escapist projections of all kinds. Recent texts appropriate Canada as a place of spiritual healing and self-discovery, as well as an ecological sanctuary unharmed by pollu- tion. Once again, these are primarily counterimages of contemporary German self-images and serve a specific function for today’s readers.

CONCLUDING REMARKS There can be little doubt about the importance of literature for the young in both creating and perpetuating powerful popular images of Canada in Germany. The fact that these images have remained basically unchanged over the last 150 years illustrates the striking solidity and durability that national images can acquire within literary discourse. Historical changes, even diametrically opposed sociopolitical systems, have not revised or even challenged perennial images of Canada. Nevertheless, this chapter has demonstrated the immense variety of interpretations and appropriations to which those images can be subjected, depending on the changing needs and self-images of the producing culture. Used for many different and even contradictory ideological concerns in war and peacetime, Canada evolved in German literary discourse from an adventure playground to a training battlefieldtoapacifist refuge to recent projections of a spiritual healing place APPROPRIATING THE “WILD NORTH”: THE IMAGE OF CANADA ... 231 and ecological paradise. Another testimony to the strength of the construct is that not a single children’s book written by a German author has presented a modern or urban version of Canada; not one addresses the complexity and diversity of Canadian culture, with its distinct regionalisms and diverse ethnic landscapes. Canada is still “beyond the farthest edges” (Braumann 1962,7, 8, 14), and there it will have to stay to fulfill German needs and desires.

NOTES 1. This research is the foundation of my PhD thesis, written in German (Seifert 2016). Its title translates as “The Image Trap: Canada in German-Language Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Perception and Reception.” 2. All translations into English in this chapter are my own. 3. James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, translated into German since the mid-1880s, were an immense influence upon the German image of Canada. Their continued popularity rested on abridged and simplified versions for the young, which focused almost exclusively on the adventurous, romantic, and exotic aspects of the narratives, while their social and political critique was leveled out. 4. May remains one of the best-known German writers, not least because of the iconic film adaptations of his works after World War II. 5. For a detailed account of the history of Canadian children’s literature in German translation, on which this section about Seton and Roberts is based, see Seifert (2007). 6. Review published anonymously in Jugendschriften-Warte 5 (1938). 7. The popular genre of the “Indian story” was politically functionalized during National Socialism, with the indigenous people employed as objects of demonstration. In a perverted analogy drawn to the contemporary situation in Germany, they represented the struggle of a noble people for their legitimate home ground, a struggle that they, in NS ideology, had to fail, not just because the tribes were not unified but also because they were racially inferior.

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Braumann, F. 1962. Die schwarzen Wasser von Anahim: Eine Pionierfamilie ﬁndet in den endlosen Wäldern Nordkanadas eine neue Heimat. Würzburg: Arena Verlag. Droonberg, E. 1921. Minnehaha. Stuttgart: Franckh. Grünau, W. von. 1937. Die letzten Inseln: Student und Goldsucher in Kanada. Leipzig: Paul List Verlag. Huber, A. O. 1937. Andy streift durch Labrador. Leipzig: Linden-Verlag H. Fischer. Huber, A. O. 1938. Schneller als RCMP. Berlin: Eden-Verlag. Kipp, F. 1938. In Schnee und Eis. Lengerich: Bischof und Klein. Kipp, F. 1943a. In nordischer Wildnis. Lengerich: Bischof und Klein. Kipp, F. 1943b. Zwei reiten durch den Busch. Lengerich: Bischof und Klein. Kraus, Robert. 1935. Freibeuter unter dem Nordlicht. Bremen: Burmester. Kreutzkamp, D. 1989. Mit dem Kanu durch Kanada. München: Frederking u. Thaler. Larsen, F. [A. O. Huber]. 1960. Land ohne Sonne und Frauen. Fürth: Quelle. Leichner, G. 1933. Abenteuerliches Kanada. Leipzig: Payne. Long Lance Buffalo Child. 1925. Häuptling Büffelkind Langspeer erzählt sein Leben. Trans. H. R. Rieder. München: List. Ott, E. 1954. Amik lernt das Leben kennen. Trans. K. Hellwig. Rüschlikon-Zürich: A. Müller. Owl, Grey [A. Belaney]. 1937. Männer der Grenze. Trans. P. Schiedeck and K. Freinthal. Stuttgart: Franckh. Owl, Grey. 1999. Men of the Last Frontier. Orig. pub. 1931. In The Collected Works of Grey Owl: Three Complete and Unabridged Canadian Classics. Etobicoke, Ont.: Prospero Books. Pantenburg, V. 1954. Hier fängt die Welt noch einmal an. Bremen: Schünemann. Riedel, K. 1940. Radium: Der Fund am Großen Bärensee. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann. Riedel, K. 1943. Durch Kanadas Wildnis: Erlebnisse eines deutschen Jägers. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann. Ross, C. 1934. Zwischen USA und dem Pol: Durch Kanada, Neufundland, Labrador und die Arktis. Leipzig: Brockhaus. Strenger, H. 1942. Strom aus der Erde. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt. Wilkes, F. 1937. Das Blockhaus am Schlangensee. Konstanz: Christliche Verlagsanstalt.

Secondary Sources Becker, S. 2000. Gattungskonstruktionen in der Geschichte der zirkulierenden Literatur: Rekonstruktionsverfahren am Beispiel des abenteuerliterarischen Netzes 1840 bis 1935. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. APPROPRIATING THE “WILD NORTH”: THE IMAGE OF CANADA ... 233

Boerner, P. 1975. National Images and Their Place in Literary Research: Germany as Seen by Eighteenth-Century French and English Reading Audiences. Monatshefte 67: 359–70. Bohm, A. 2000. A Promised Land? Canada through German Eyes. In Canada Observed: Perspectives from Abroad and from Within, ed. J. Kleist, 1–13. New York: Peter Lang. Diner, D. 2002. Feindbild Amerika: Über die Beständigkeit eines Ressentiments. Berlin: Propyläen. Dupke, T. 1994. Herman Löns: Mythos und Wirklichkeit. Hildesheim: Classen. Durzak, M. 1977. Abrechnung mit einer Utopie? Zum Amerika-Bild im jüngsten deutschen Roman. In Deutschlands literarisches Amerikabild: Neuere Forschungen zur Amerikarezeption der deutschen Literatur, ed. A. Ritter, 538–61. Hildesheim, New York: Olms. Gassert, P. 1997. Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung 1933–1945. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Goetsch, P. 1983. The Image of Canada in 19th Century German Travel Literature. In German-Canadian Yearbook 7, ed. H. Froeschle, 121–35. Toronto: Historical Society of Mecklenburg Upper Canada. Hopster, N. 2001. Kinder- und Jugendliteratur 1933–1945: Ein Handbuch. Vol. 2. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler. Kallenbach, H. 1941. Die Kulturpolitik der deutschen Tageszeitungen im Krieg. Dresden: Dittert. Leerssen, J. 2000. The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey. Poetics Today 2(2): 267–92. Leerssen, J. 2003. National Identity and National Stereotype. Images. http:// www.imagologica.eu/leerssen. Meune, M. 2006. De Karl May à Karl Marx: L’Autre Amérique dans la perception de l’autre Allemagne. In Canada from the Outside In: New Trends in Canadian Studies, ed. P. Anctil and Z. Bernd, 267–82. Brüssel: Peter Lang. Müller, A. 1939. Rolf Torring, Tom Shark und andere “Helden.” Jugendschriften- Warte 5: 68–73. Nassen, U. 1987. Jugend, Buch und Konjunktur 1933–1945. München: Fink. Neumann, B. 2009. Die Rhetorik der Nation in britischer Literatur und anderen Medien des 18. Jahrhunderts. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Rubio, M. 1994. Children’s Literature (Overview). In Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, vol. 1, ed. E. Benson, 228–30. London: Routledge. Schemm, H. 1933. Das Jugendbuch im Dritten Reich. Stuttgart: Franckh (Reichsleitung des NSLB Bayreuth). Seifert, M. 2005. The Image Trap: The Translation of English-Canadian Children’s Literature into German. In Children’s Literature Global and Local: Social and Aesthetic Perspectives, ed. E. O’Sullivan, K. Reynolds, and R. Romøren, 227–39. Oslo: Novus Press. 234 M. SEIFERT

Seifert, M. 2007. Selective Canadiana: A Translation History of English-Language Canadian Children’s Literature into German. In Translating Canada: Charting the Institutions and Inﬂuences of Cultural Transfer. Canadian Writing in German/y, ed. L. von Flotow and R. Nischik, 219–42. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Seifert, M. 2016. Die Bilderfalle: Kanada in der deutschsprachigen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur. Produktion und Rezeption. Beiträge zur Kanadistik Bd. 19: Schriftenreihe der Gesellschaft für Kanada-Studien. Augsburg: Wißner-Verlag. Tabbert, R. 1995. Umweltmythen in Kinderbüchern verschiedener Nationen. In Naturkind, Landkind, Stadtkind: Literarische Bilderwelten kindlicher Umwelt, ed. U. Nassen, 135–51. München: Fink.

Martina Seifert studied English, German, and German as a foreign language at Leipzig University, Germany, and at York University, Toronto, Canada. She then worked on a major research project on intercultural encounters in German children’s literature since 1945, resulting in the co-authored Ent-Fernungen (2006). From 2005 to 2011 she was the DAAD-lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, and she also served as a board member of the Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature. Her PhD thesis, which analyzes images of Canada in German children’s literature, was published in German in 2016. She currently works as a high-school teacher at Gymnasium Bleckede, Germany. CHAPTER 12

Travel as Construction of Self and Nation

Margaret R. Higonnet

Travel is a way of making and remaking the self and one’s social identity. Often in children’s literature and fairy tales, orphans who decide to go on the road translate losses into gains. For a child protagonist, travel may offer an Oedipal escape from home, release from conﬁning but accepted conventions, or even liberation from the symbolic ogre of physical imprisonment. Journeys take one from “home” toward a future, and in the nineteenth century the future often implied the construction of a national ideal and cultural identity. For the thoughtful children who so often are forced onto the road in juvenile literature, travel rooted in Odyssean or picaresque models enables a series of encounters that open up knowledge of the world and knowledge of one’s own capacities, as the protagonist recognizes and explores similarities and differences among peoples. Children on their own, in the familiar trope of the orphan that launches a great many narratives for children, center the quest for a self through a series of encounters with others who potentially cohere into a larger social “family.” Some of the earliest texts directed at the young (or appropriated by them) are Odyssean and challenge the voyager with natural and

M.R. Higonnet (*) University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, US

© The Author(s) 2017 235 E. O’Sullivan, A. Immel (eds.), Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8_12 236 M.R. HIGONNET supernatural hazards. Three books from the early eighteenth century—the abbé Fénelon’s Voyages de Télémaque (1699), which was written for his tutee, a grandson of Louis XIV; Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which gave birth to generations of robinsonades; and Jonathan Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships (1726)—laid a foundation for nineteenth-century fiction for the young that placed a new focus on the shaping of a nation. This chapter explores two texts about the shaping of America and of France: Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) and G. Bruno’s Le Tour de la France par deux enfants (1877).1 In each, an episodic journey becomes the thread that stitches together different elements of society. At the same time, spatial displace- ments teach lessons about social difference as well as about oneself. In my investigation of narratives on the road, I steer my course by addressing three interrelated themes. The first picks up the focus of this volume on sameness and difference. Difference is the grounding impetus of plot and of a journey. Travel from here to there enables a reconstruction of the self. Boundaries drawn between cultures, between peoples who are perceived as the same or different—whether by physical location, language, dress, skin color, or beliefs—provide a kind of map, both visual and verbal. Maps, of course, delineate inside from outside, one culture or nation from another. Yet the “others” one encounters may be indigenous or foreign, monsters or mirrors. Those ambiguities enable us to recognize what José Ortega y Gasset describes as eadem sed aliter: the humanist discovers the same within difference (1961, 49). Thus, in Swift’s novel, the monsters encountered by Gulliver, often presented in pairs, satirize human nature. The journey may pass through what Pierre Nora (1997) calls lieux de mémoire, or sites of memory. For narratives about orphans, a break in the family already inscribes a difference in the child’s self-image and a rupture that separates children from their home.2 Child travelers may revisit traces and narrative records left by previous travelers or by members of the family who have been lost. Key scenes may take place in cemeteries, in a gesture both to honor the lost family and to lay to rest a former self. The orphan (or virtual orphan) who sets out on a quest may need to visit the dead—the uncannily familiar that has become other. Like Odysseus and Aeneas, epic travelers from the classical past who visit the underworld, child heroes too pay their respects to the past. That pilgrim- age will mark the transition from a lost family to a new sisterhood or brotherhood. The birth of a nation out of difference and violence will TRAVEL AS CONSTRUCTION OF SELF AND NATION 237 also enable the making of a new “family,” with new roles for the protagonists. Maps thus become not just geographic but also qualitative records of cultural and psychological formation. My second theme is the importance of embedded non-fiction and other narratives that stand as markers or signposts in the narrative. Isabelle Nières has called attention to the surprising presence in children’s literature of “intertextual games,” including quotations and other references to texts, authors, and genres. She suggests that these allusions define an author’s vision as well as the child audience’s body of readings “at a given moment in time” (1995, 50). There is, of course, a long tradition of works for children that blend fictional narrative with a concern for conveying factual information. In the texts I present here, mixed discourses of fiction and documentary offer a formal hybridity that corresponds to the narrator’s goal of shaping a national hybridity. While the traditional aim of such didactic texts is often seamlessness (although frequently that illusionistic goal is not achieved), Sedgwick and Bruno more explicitly embed their multiple narratives, some of them drawn from printed documentaries and others passed along orally, thereby creating an archive or a toolkit to make a new society out of heterogeneous parts. They juxtapose factual accounts of national history with biography and legend to suggest ways of reimagining the social order. In both these fictions, successive stories define and embrace different cultures that coexist in the same space. My third theme, the invention of a national family, mirrors the second. The protagonist may be both an orphan and an exile, as is the case in the narratives I discuss here. Bruno’s treatment of the double break, from family and home, is relatively simple: after losing both father and mother, two Alsatian boys must choose their nationality. Under the terms of the Treaty of Frankfurt signed on May 10, 1871, at the end of the Franco- Prussian War, residents of nearly 1,700 towns passed from French to German control and were given until October 1, 1872, to choose their nationality. Instructed by their father on his deathbed to find his brother in southern France, the boys flee German-occupied Phalsbourg for France in the first pages of Bruno’s novel. They must find their uncle, but they will also find many havens and protectors; their mentors and friends will become part of their imagined brotherhood or community, as Benedict Anderson puts it (1991,6–8). The domestic ruptures in Sedgwick’s novel are much more complicated. They involve national, religious, and racial differences, and incorporate the 238 M.R. HIGONNET kind of violence that is obscured in Bruno’s postwar novel. There are three historical layers in Sedgwick’sstory.Thefirst is the conflict between Anglicans and Puritans, which drives William Fletcher to the New World in the first chapter. Second, we encounter internal divisions among settlers in Massachusetts, which again oppose Puritans to Anglicans but also lead some colonists to leave Boston for more autonomous settlements. And third, massacres and cultural conflicts mark the encounters of the colonists and the native peoples, particularly the Pequods. The orphaned heroine, Hope Leslie, finds a new family with Mr. Fletcher in New England at the very moment when his wife and all but one of his children are killed. There she will bond with the surviving son, Everell Fletcher, as well as with a Pequod girl, Magawisca, who had been taken in by Mr. Fletcher and who saves Everell from execution. Thus Sedgwick at once foregrounds the destruction of families and the creation of new kinship lines across racial difference. Her complex interweaving of adoptive families offers a structural model for a new kind of state grounded in hospitality and tolerance.

CANONICAL MODELS Many early works read by children depended upon travel to plot the opportunity for growth, preparing the genre of the Bildungsroman; juvenile literature appropriated Odyssean wanderings into a travel form of their own. One progenitor, Fénelon’s Voyages de Télémaque (1699), echoes yet inverts the Odyssey, which Homer had framed as a return to Ithaca. Telemachus, the young son of Odysseus, journeys away from home in a quest not only to find his father but also to prove himself. The son recapitulates Odysseus’s adventures, stopping on several islands to meet mythic figures. As shown on a map that Fénelon included in his volume, the eighteenth-century reader encounters the ancient Mediterranean world along the way (Fénelon, 1717, 2:526). Given that Fénelon’s audience was a boy in line to inherit the French throne, historians have been particularly struck by the way Telemachus challenges a monarch he meets with questions about virtuous rule. The path to nation-building at that historical moment led through the moral education of the future ruler. Twenty years later, the audience was the rising bourgeoisie. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) inspired robinsonades because it connected a shipwreck on an island to an individualist search for autonomy, the (re)building of a world through bricolage, and the imperialist conquest of native others. Paradoxically, isolation on an island enables Crusoe’s engagement in social TRAVEL AS CONSTRUCTION OF SELF AND NATION 239 construction. The castaway’s experiment in reconstructing a lost world leads to his symbolic encounter with the “other,” Friday. The patterns set by these narratives were deeply influential in the nineteenth century. The nineteenth-century texts I focus on in this chapter invest their travel stories with an implied national narrative, which can be viewed as a kind of Freudian family romance.3 The present of the tale intersects with the past of historical documentation. Thus we can see traces of the dialogue between present and past, just as Fénelon played with three layers, from Odysseus to Telemachus to current readers, in order to instruct and improve his youthful protagonist and readers. Movement through space suggests the possibility of mental shifts and growth. My two examples point toward my general theses and suggest ways in which women writers deliberately invoke literary and social conventions, yet deviate from them. In general, travel involves not only physical change but Bildung—encounters that change the self.

Hope Leslie In Hope Leslie (1827), my first example of a national narrative, Catharine Sedgwick (1789–1867) traces religious and political conflicts that result in arduous journeys, orphaned children, and the transformation of identities. Through embedded documents and oral histories, she challenges conventional narratives of nation formation. In their place, she imagines new possibilities of community and posits a new kind of hybrid national family that transcends racial othering. Her two-stage narrative is radical. Her first chapter lays out the Puritan rebellion against Anglican suppression of freedom of religious choice, which leads William Fletcher to New England in the years just before the Pequod War of 1636–1637. In the following chapters, which focus on the orphan Hope Leslie, who leaves England to become part of Mr. Fletcher’s Puritan family, we observe how the Puritans themselves replicate such suppressions in their harsh treatment of indigenous peoples, whom they finally massacre in May 1637, subjecting the few survivors to false imprisonment and enslavement. American frontier narratives typically map an expansive colonization that leads toward the establishment of a new nation. In Last of the Mohicans, published one year earlier, James Fenimore Cooper defined an American masculinity unencumbered by female relations through a cross-racial homoerotic relationship at the violent interface of English, French, and Native American cultures (Fiedler 1936; Sommer 1991). Conversely, 240 M.R. HIGONNET

Sedgwick maps the frontier as the contracting edge of a vanishing people or nation, whose elegiac voice is that of an Indian girl. She pairs the displacement of her heroine, Hope, with the forcible displacement of this Pequod girl, Magawisca, from her native settlement. Her Puritan captors transfer Magawisca and her brother to the hospitable Fletcher household, but her Pequod father recovers his children after slaughtering most of the Fletcher family. In this early girls’ book, Sedgwick’s models of female heroism within the context of these multiple conflicts are Hope Leslie, a free spirit brought up between Anglican and Protestant cultures, who twice frees an Indian from unjust imprisonment, and Magawisca, the daughter of a chieftain, who sacrifices her own arm to save the life of Fletcher’s son, Everell. Sedgwick asks how a girl can become a new American kind of heroine, inspired by key virtues of gratitude, loyalty to one’s family, willingness to explore the new, and respect for the different faiths of others. These values paradoxically come into focus for the girls, who have lost one or both parents, who share more than one family, and who choose love and self-sacrifice rather than honor and death. The agitated intercontinental plot draws on constant physical travel that enables emigration to the “new” world, intercultural exchange, and the formation of new selves. In a time of travel by foot, the ability to decode tracks and penetrate disguises provides analogies to the necessary work of deconstructing the myths and misrepresentations perpetrated by historical records. The history of war between Puritan and Pequod is indeed traumatic: Hope’s sister Faith, carried off by Magawisca’s father, becomes mute. The conflicts and massacres of May and June 1637 and the subsequent emigration of the few surviving Pequod shape the destinies of the characters. They also recapitulate for Sedgwick’s young audience the ongoing efforts by Indians in the southeastern states to protect their lands against white encroachment. Disparities of ethnic habitus drive some of the actors in their racial prejudices, but they also become the object of play, as the heroines mask their identities. Sedgwick’s ingenious presentation suggests that antithetical discourses of difference by virtue of dress or skin color are arbitrary. She tackles surface differences in order to mock vanity but also to convey respect for distinct cultural identities. For Hope, who has lived in both Anglican and Puritan families, such distinctions defining identity must be read with care and interrogated. Anglicans do not come off well in this New England tale. Hope’s Anglican aunt is obsessed with vain ornamentation, and the TRAVEL AS CONSTRUCTION OF SELF AND NATION 241 villain of the novel, Sir Philip, is a corrupt rake who merely masquerades as a Puritan. By contrast, the Pequod chieftain’s daughter Magawisca, when captured by the Puritans, clings to her richly decorated native garment, which the narrator describes at length as embroidered with hieroglyphs, gracefully draped, and neatly fitted to enhance her “noble demeanor” and “peculiar beauty” (Sedgwick 1987, 23, 282). She wears the “peculiar costume of her people” not out of vanity but to express her “national pride” and “high birth” when she is brought to trial for performing memorial rituals at her mother’s grave (282). Yet dress can be changed and, more significantly, religious allegiance as well. Hope Leslie and her sister Faith leave behind the Anglican world of their dead father and come to New England to embrace the Puritan faith and cultural norms of Mr. Fletcher, who takes them into his family. In turn, when the child Faith Leslie is captured by the Pequods, she adopts their dress and eventually marries Magawisca’s brother, who himself con- verts to Catholicism. While distinctive dress seems to signify otherness among Puritans, Papists, and Pequods, the possibilities of disguise and cross-dressing expose the insubstantiality of such distinctions. In the chaotic and “intricate maze” at the conclusion of the novel, Magawisca’s brother disguises himself as an Italian sailor in order to recover his wife, Faith. Hope’s most heroic action is the liberation of her spiritual “sister,” Magawisca, from the prison where she is being held on a charge of conspiracy against the settlers. She succeeds by dressing Magawisca in a man’s cloak. The encounter with “others” may be resisted by secondary characters who reject change. Like distinctions of dress, distinctions of “civilization” permeate a language of insult: the dignified and eloquent Pequods who join the Fletcher family are labeled “tawnies” and “savages” by Hope’s servant and aunt. English colonists charge the wise woman Nelema with witchcraft, and she is imprisoned after saving one of the Puritans from a nearly fatal rattlesnake bite. Even a kindly but distrustful servant, Digby, describes Indians as “a kind of beast we don’t comprehend” (42). Such bestialization is precisely the mark of incomprehension. In response, Magawisca challenges religious principles that seem to her hypocritical: she asks how “the book of your law is better than that written on our hearts” if it permits Puritans to decapitate a teenaged Pequod boy who was defending his family’s hut (51). One of the most experimental features of Sedgwick’s hybrid narrative is the way she incorporates quotations from historical printed documents. In 242 M.R. HIGONNET her preface, Sedgwick declares that she has studied the record of the Pequod wars as “an impartial observer, in a light very different from that in which they were regarded by our ancestors” (6). From the outset, then, she underscores shifting perspectives and claims to be a reliable narrator of history in her fiction. She quotes “from an authentic record of the times” to describe the political economy that frames her own frame-breaking story.4 She adapts traditional American myths with the goal of interrogat- ing Puritan control of the historical narrative about the founding of a “city on the hill” and a new state. She therefore supplements historical records from the period of about 1637—that is, in counterpoint to the male historians, she gives voice to women and to Native Americans, just as she sets female protagonists at the center of her frontier narrative. Magawisca’s eloquent account of the massacre of her family by Puritans, as well as her appeal for freedom when she is put on trial, secure the reader’s sympathy against racist attacks by her enemies (266). Sedgwick’s patchwork construction of her narrative, into which she inserts early historical documents, gives a gendered twist to her story. She sets the Puritan archives against the oral account by Magawisca, officersofthecolonyagainstameregirl, and armed colonists against 400 men, women, and children who are slaughtered at Mystic Fort like beasts “frying in the fire,” a phrase drawn from William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation (1856,369).5 She quotes an early historian, William Hubbard, who considers the passive resistance of Pequods trapped “like sullen dogs” in the Great Swamp Massacre as self-willed “madness,” only to condemn Hubbard’s distortion of Pequod courage (54).6 While Bradford judged the incineration and slaughter at Mystic Fort to be “a sweet sacrifice,” Magawisca’svivid description of these events horrifies a modern reader. The narrator and her Indian heroine comment on the “contrariety” between the “book of your law” and the “conduct of its professors” (51). This deeply ironic narrative pattern liberates Sedgwick to pursue a track through the early wilderness of colonization and religious savagery. The oral, so important in literature for the young, recovers its cultural power. Sedgwick does not incorporate any printed map into her text, but, in drawing on historical documents that did so, she maps out the relationships among Boston, the political center of Puritan settlements, and archetypal sites of conflict in homesteads, battlegrounds, and Indian camps. If the documents and oral histories offer an encounter with the past, they also point toward the importance of building anew. TRAVEL AS CONSTRUCTION OF SELF AND NATION 243

Through her travels and divergent modes of education, Hope Leslie learns to move beyond faith to tolerance under the guidance of William Fletcher. Despite traumatic massacres on both sides, Fletcher in his blended family unites children from different faiths and customs. The novel asks how to construct a nation grounded on equality, freedom of conscience, and peaceful negotiation with others. Hope’s familial situation and travels have special significance for her prophetic role in Sedgwick’s novel. A free spirit, her “variant religious sentiments permitted her mind to expand beyond the contracted boundaries of sectarian faith” (128). First educated in a family of divided religious allegiances, then in a family that adopted two young Pequod prisoners (also orphaned by the death of their mother), Hope acts on her instinct to afford a neutral ground, with respect for Native American treatment of nature, and sympathy for those who suffered tragic extermination at the hands of the Puritans. She therefore refuses to conform to the patriarchal order. The national family she strives to build reaches out to include Magawisca and her brother, and another orphan, Esther, a Puritan niece of Governor John Winthrop. The crisis of the novel is prepared when Hope and Magawisca arrange to meet on a nocturnal journey to the island cemetery where both of their mothers are buried. The future union across racial difference requires an epic passage to the realm of death. Magawisca’s invitation to meet secretly encourages Hope’s expectation to encounter her own sister, Faith, and to bring her back into the Puritan fold. The meeting tests the girls’ cross-racial friendship since it delivers Hope’s sister, who has married Magawisca’s brother, into the hands of the Puritans. At the same time, Magawisca, who has come to decorate a grave monument and perform a ritual for her mother, is seized and then put on trial. This key episode expands the notion of sisterhood for Hope, who must recognize her own sister’scultural difference and relinquish her, while she must also recognize and liber- ate her spiritual sister, Magawisca (183). Magawisca’slessonisthatthe “Great Spirit” looksdownonthetwograves“with an equal eye” (189). This message of tolerance drives home the difference between Sedgwick’s sisterhood and other “foundational fictions” built on national brotherhood. Magawisca’s vision of transcendent harmony projects the possibility of a national family achieved through revolutionary pacifism. She eloquently defends a universal faith in the Great Spirit inscribed in “the hearts of his original children” (287). 244 M.R. HIGONNET

Tour of France by Two Children Half a century after Sedgwick’s historical novel for “young misses” about the founding of a new nation, “G. Bruno” (pseudonym of Augustine Tuillerie Fouillée, 1833–1923) composed a work of historical fiction to be used in French schools. Bruno’s Le Tour de la France par deux enfants: Devoir et patrie, livre de lecture courante (Tour of France by Two Children, 1877), published a few years after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, recounts how two orphans leave their home in Phalsbourg, Lorraine, when its inhabitants are forced by the terms of the Treaty of Frankfurt to choose between German and French citizenship before October 1872. This famous school text, a pedagogical introduction to civic, geographical, scientific, and historical knowledge about the different parts of France, was wildly popular with adults as well as the young, selling three million copies in ten years and reaching far beyond the audience of the schools. On the title page, Bruno notes her inclusion of “200 gravures,” and her preface calls attention to maps and portraits.7 As she explains, to understand the abstract term for “fatherland” (“la patrie” or France), a child must move beyond political names to the lessons taught by “things.” The book must make one’s country visible and alive (il faut lui rendre la patrie visible et vivante) so that one can see and touch it, assembling all aspects of French life in a compendium that in its own way resembles Jan Comenius’s Orbis pictus (4). The “fatherland” she presents is largely secular, a product of the Third Republic, as Bruno obscures the monarchic past of army and church. The child heroes never meet a regi- ment, officer, uniform, priest, nun, or lay brother (Halévy 1937, 337).8 In the design of her book as a set of lessons of things (leçons de choses), Bruno reaches back to Comenius by juxtaposing texts with images and weaving descriptions into her suspenseful narrative. In his famous ency- clopaedic illustrated schoolbook, Orbis sensualium pictus (1658), Comenius started from the premise that the sensual perceptions of things and their differences grounded all wisdom. His book for children therefore offered “a picture and nomenclature of all the chief things in the world, and of men’s actions in their way of living” (Comenius 1658, n.p.). The two tools, then, are images and words. Careful descriptions accompany the 150 images of Comenius’s universe—the professions, printing, and so forth—all with details numbered to encourage active reading rather than passive ingestion. I invoke Comenius here because his encyclopedia begins with a voyage into sensory knowledge. The master exhorts, “Come boy. TRAVEL AS CONSTRUCTION OF SELF AND NATION 245

[Veni puer.] We will go into the world and view all things.” In the image that corresponds to this dialogue, we see that the study is a vast window or path into the world, and the book itself offers the journey to children at home or at school. Similarly, to achieve this goal of understanding, Bruno explains that she will draw on children’s love of travel literature to take her readers from Phalsbourg around the entire nation. The first event is the occupation of the homeland by Germany at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. This imposition of a new political order constitutes a trauma, a rupture, and loss of André and Julian Volden’s home at the same time that they lose their father, whose death is related to the war. The book itself becomes a site of memory. The brothers flee Lorraine, occupied by the German military, or “others,” in order to recover the security of their own language and culture (Ozouf and Ozouf 1997, 281). Like the Leslie girls, the Volden orphans choose to go into exile, passing through the “Porte de France.” Following their father’s deathbed instructions to go to Marseilles to find their uncle, they escape by memorizing a map on the wall of a forester and by reading the stars. Yet, while their trauma isolates them, it also unites them, creating a strong bond between the brothers and introducing them to new paternal, maternal, and even fraternal figures—one of whom, the little orphan Jean-Joseph from the Auvergne, rejoins them at the end of the story. For each region they traverse, the narrator inserts a departmental map showing the towns through which they pass, including a large section on Paris. The first map shows Lorraine and Alsace, with a new frontier that demarcates Germany’s seizure of French territory in 1870 (Fig. 12.1). Such topographic maps were a growing feature of children’s narratives, as Ségolène Le Men notes, beginning with Fénelon and the eighteenth- century robinsonades (1992, 122 n11). Their travels permit the brothers to observe the variety and differences among regions of France that nevertheless constitute the unity of the whole (Halévy 1937, 338). The children also carry with them a book that recounts the lives of great Frenchmen, a gift from a woman they helped. Fourteen-year-old André helps pay their way from place to place by working as an apprentice locksmith or unskilled laborer, learning different skills appropriate to regional forms of production, while seven- year-old Julien goes to school or undertakes domestic tasks and reads from his book of Lives, whose stories are keyed to each region, to entertain his hosts at their work. Nières points out that the book carries a “collective memory” of Frenchness (1995, 50). Part of the aim of this school volume 246 M.R. HIGONNET

Fig. 12.1 Map of Alsace and Lorraine from G. Bruno (Augustine Tuillerie Fouillée), Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, with engravings by Pérot (Paris: Belin, 1878), 16. Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library was to build up an imagined material world corresponding to the children’s national identity. The children are therefore startled when they encounter “foreign” languages and cultures within the boundaries of France, as when they reach Provence. In short, there are two kinds of “other” or “difference” embedded in this journey: the German others from whom the children ﬂee, and the French others whom they come to know in travels deﬁned by the acquisition of knowledge. TRAVEL AS CONSTRUCTION OF SELF AND NATION 247

Like Sedgwick, Bruno pastes documentary forms into her narrative. Her richly embedded texts and images—inset maps and pictures of places, agriculture, industry, and great men—all serve to build community and to encourage self-education. The diverse textual resources that she draws upon for the education of the children underscore the diversity of France itself. From young Julien’s book within the book, biographical accounts of great Frenchmen mention birthplaces, while the portraits of great men (e.g. Claude le Lorrain) show them in their maturity and often at work. Accompanying the maps, portraits, and engravings of agricultural tools and industrial procedures are long explanatory captions. These sidebar text-images introduce a kind of hypertextual density that enriches the narrative. At the same time, the recurrent maps, which punctuate each new phase of the boys’ journey, provide a formal continuity, as if Bruno were inventing a new genre as shewentalong(LeMen1992,122). The places the boys visit become “sites of memory” whose stories can be told as they journey. Along the way, Julien celebrates Frenchmen of all professions, including Vauban, designer of fortifications, the Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, the navigator La Pérouse, “who was born in Albi,” the surgeon Ambroise Paré, and the self-taught inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard. Bruno’s “great men” also include, of course, the women: Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who helped Charles VII defeat the English and secured his coronation at Reims in 1429, and Jeanne Hachette, who in 1472 defended the town of Beauvais from Burgundian attackers. It is particularly significant that Julien’s book within a book introduces a sem- blance of historical continuity, giving order to a pastiche of inventions, discoveries, and other triumphs that shape a national identity rooted in cultural events more than in military victories. The children’s shared culture is historical rather than fictional. Bruno, who took her pseudonym in honor of the great Italian philosopher and freethinker, pointedly observes that the father’s death in a fall from scaffolding at the beginning of the story resulted from a war wound that weakened his leg. At the end, when the new family reaches their final destination, a ruined farm, she provides an epigraph to chapter 119: “The evils of war do not finish with it: how many ruins are left after war has passed by!” (300). The caption to the picture of the farm where the friends will rebuild their lives also offers a miniature tract against war, embedded in fine print. As in Sedgwick’s novel, Bruno’snarratoruses the children’s journeys to assemble the nation allegorically, while raising questions about militarism and imperialism. 248 M.R. HIGONNET

While Pierre Nora stresses the nostalgic side of this portrait gallery of the past, other readers have focused on the economic aspects of Bruno’s narrative. The travels map out a country in economic transition, and even the children’s modes of transport become symbolic of regional development and national progress. They walk, join a traveling salesman in his wagon while they help him in his work, ride a train when Julien sprains his ankle, then take a canal boat and a larger boat that carries them northward until it is shipwrecked. Bruno notes the different modes of observation that accompany the different modes of transport, one of the great interests of nineteenth-century travelers (Schivelbusch 1986,56–8). At each point in their trajectory they observe both manual rural labor, such as silk-worm farming, and urban technology, such as the massive factories that operate day and night at Creusot (diagrams of furnaces help the reader to understand how they work). The author emphasizes the modernity of inventions that transformed weaving and printing, and, in later editions, the submarine and cinematograph. In the course of their encounters, the children create a new geographically extended family that includes an old friend of their father, the old woman to whom he sends them, the salesman with whom they live for a couple of months, a child whom they save from burning, their uncle, and a sailor who is a friend of the uncle. Threatened by loss, by the ﬂawed characters they encounter, by shipwreck, and by treacherous sailors, the children are tested for their courage and selﬂessness. They even manage to rescue the captain of the shipwrecked vessel. Mutual aid is the key theme. At the end of their journey, they gather at the farm fallen into ruin, which they will rebuild as they rebuild a new family with their uncle and friends. In this patriotic portrait of a nation, as the children work and study, they grow and assume new civic responsibilities.

CONCLUSION In the two texts that I have addressed here, women authors present an anti-monarchic, pacifist, and secular vision. Departure signifies difference and implies the possible construction of new identities. The construction of a new community springs from the need to construct a new family. Orphanhood is a precondition in both Hope Leslie and Le Tour de la France par deux enfants for the journeys through which children will allegorically assemble the nation in the form of a surro- gate family. Their status as children allows them to symbolize both TRAVEL AS CONSTRUCTION OF SELF AND NATION 249 innocence and social innovation. Sedgwick presents a revisionist account of the settlement of New England and the cross-cultural encounters in which American nationhood is grounded following the war waged by the Puritan immigrants against the indigenous Pequod people. Bruno’s Tour de la France celebrates the industrious determination of two orphans to embrace Frenchness following the death of their parents and the occupation of Alsace and Lorraine by “others.” Both authors critique foundational violence and build on mutual aid to shape community across differences of race, religion, and class. My focus here has been on stories that map new worlds—,that is, travel narratives saturated with political ideology and tropes about the developing child, who in turn symbolizes national identity. Both stories should be read as trauma narratives rooted in the children’s status as orphans and their experience of violence and loss. In Sedgwick’s novel, for example, Faith’s amnesia and muteness may be signifiers of revolutionary violence. Both authors rewrite history, and in a broad narrative sweep, nation formation replaces family. Both Sedgwick and Bruno wrote for and about republics that were still young. Significantly, they used embedded narratives, both documentary and oral, verbal and visual, to juxtapose opposed ways of understanding how to make a new society and to reflect on the birth of a new nation out of difference and violence. I suggest that they offer a female vision of growth into tolerance, a cult of justice and liberty, thereby using individual histories to rewrite history writ large.

NOTES 1. First published as Le Tour de France par deux enfants: Devoir et patrie; this title changed in 1878 to Le Tour de la France... In dozens of later editions the author, Augustine Tuillerie Fouillée (pseudonym G. Bruno), added new material and secularized her text. 2. I use “orphan” here, as in the Oxford English Dictionary and the UNICEF protocols, to include children who are either fatherless or motherless. 3. Just as the male Bildungsroman, according to Marthe Robert, arose at a particular historical juncture to describe speciﬁc middle-class aspirations and anxieties (1972, 151), the female Bildungsroman, according to Marianne Hirsch, embodies a female version of a Freudian family romance (1983,25–6). 4. Her endnotes refer to Governor John Winthrop’s History of New England, 1630–1649, Benjamin Trumbull’s Complete History of Connecticut, and William Hubbard’s Indian Wars, which she read in the 1814 edition. 250 M.R. HIGONNET

5. Bradford’s manuscript was drawn on by eighteenth-century historians of the war against the Pequods. 6. Sedgwick used the 1814 edition of Hubbard’s Narrative of the Indian Wars, from which she quotes passages about the deaths of the Pequods as well as Governor Winthrop’s protection of Mononotto’s wife and children (Hubbard 1814,46–7). 7. The title of the 1884 edition specifies 212 instructive engravings and nineteen maps. 8. Hesba Stretton (pseudonym of Sarah Smith) published a novel, Max Krömer: A Story of the Siege of Strasbourg (1871), about the misery she observed among Alsatian women and children following the Siege of Strasbourg. Marah Gubar (2009) has offered a reading of this novel’s pacifism in the first chapter of her book. While the two works by Stretton and Bruno could be compared, the themes and narrative strategies presented in this chapter are specific to Bruno’s text.

REFERENCES

Primary Sources Bradford, W. 1856. History of Plymouth Plantation. Boston: Little, Brown. Bruno, G. [pseudonym of Augustine Tuillerie Fouillée]. [1877]. Le Tour de la France par deux enfants: Devoir et patrie, livre de lecture courante avec 200 gravures instructives pour leçons de choses. Illus. by Perot. Paris: Belin. http:// gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k373586p/f1.image (accessed June 24, 2015). Comenius, J. 1658. Orbis sensualium pictus. Trans. C. Hoole. London: Abel Swall. Defoe, D. 1719. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York. Mariner: who lived eight and twenty years, all alone in an un-inhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; having been cast on shore by shipwreck, wherein all the men perished but himself; with an account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by pyrates. London: Taylor. Fénelon, F. de. 1717. Les Avantures de Télémaque, ﬁls d’Ulysse. Paris: Delaulne. Hubbard, W. 1814. A Narrative of the Indian Wars in New-England, from the First Planting Thereof in the Year 1607, to the Year 1677. Orig. pub. 1677. Brattleboro, VT: William Fessenden. Sedgwick, C. M. 1987. Hope Leslie: or, Early Times in the Massachusetts. Orig. pub. 1827. Ed. M. Kelley. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Stretton, H. [pseudonym of Sarah Smith]. 1871. Max Krömer: A Story of the Siege of Strasbourg. London: Religious Tract Society. Swift, J. (1726). Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships. London: Benjamin Motte. TRAVEL AS CONSTRUCTION OF SELF AND NATION 251

Secondary Sources Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso. Fiedler, L. 1936. Come Back to the Raft Ag’in Huck Honey! Partisan Review 25: 664–71. Gubar, M. 2009. Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Halévy, D. 1937. La République des Ducs. Paris: Grasset. Hirsch, M. 1983. Spiritual Bildung: The Beautiful Soul as Paradigm. In The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, ed. E. Abel, M. Hirsch, and E. Langland, 23–48. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Le Men, S. 1992. La Pédagogie par l’image dans un manuel de la Troisième République: Le Tour de la France par deux enfants.InUsages de l’image au dix- neuvième siècle, ed. S. Michaud, J.-Y. Mollier, and N. Savy, 119–27. Paris: Créaphis. Nières, I. 1995. Writers Writing: A Short History of Children’s Literature within Their Texts. In Aspects and Issues in the History of Children’s Literature, ed. M. Nikolajeva, 49–56. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Nora, P. (ed.). 1997. Les Lieux de mémoire.Vol.1:La République.Paris:Gallimard. Ortega y Gasset, J. 1961. Unity and Diversity of Europe. Orig. pub. 1941 In Ortega y Gasset, History as a System, and Other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History,43–86. Trans. H. Weyl. New York: Norton. Ozouf, M., and J. Ozouf. 1997. Le Tour de la France par deux enfants: Le Petit livre rouge de la République. In Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 1, ed. P. Nora, 277–301. Paris: Gallimard. Robert, M. 1972. Roman des origines et origines du roman. Paris: B. Grasset. Schivelbusch, W. 1986. The Railway Journey. The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sommer, D. 1991. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Margaret R. Higonnet, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut, USA, has worked on a range of topics, including the literature of World War I, feminist theory, comparative literature, and children’s literature. She was co-editor of the journal Children’s Literature for ﬁve years, co- edited Girls, Boys, Books, Toys with Beverly Clark (1999), and has published numerous articles on children’s literature in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Children’s Literature, The Lion and the Unicorn, Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War, Children and Armed Conﬂict,andChildren’s Literature and Culture of the First World War and in French and German publications. INDEX

A Alsace-Lorraine, 2, 245, 246f, 249 ABC books, see alphabet books alter ego, 42–44 Abenteuerliches Kanada Amarė detskii sad, 198–199 (Leichner), 227 American Revolution, 20 Abyssinia, images of, 140 Americans Academy of the Applied Arts enslaved, 77–78 (see also slavery) (Prague), 6 Native, 77–78, 231n7, 242 actors in religious context, 157 Ami des Enfants, L’ (Berquin), 131 Addams, Jane, 180 Anglocentrism, 54, 64–65 adventure ﬁction, 16, 216–219, 223, anthropology, 75, 77–81 227 anti-modernism, 221 Africa, development of, 143–144 Applegate, Celia, 93 Africans, 77–78, 94–95, 98, 140 Arabians, 59, 60f, 61 Aikin, John, 65 art nouveau, 197 air journey, image of, 207–208 Aryanism in adventure ﬁction, 223 Alaska Jim: A Hero of the Canadian Asians, 77–78, 95 Police, 222–223 Aspin, Jehosophat, 71 Albert, Prince Consort, 82, 84n5, audience, children as, 10, 15, 34, 36, 84n7 90, 93, 105, 116, 130, 171, 237, See also Fine Crystal Palace the 244 Prince Built, The (Newcombe) Aufgepaßt! (Meggendorfer), 99–100, Allen, T. S., 172–173 102f, 103 alphabet books, 12, 15–16, 38, 66n4, Aunt Mavor’s Picture Books for 67n11, 74 Little Readers (Routledge), 74, Alsace heureuse, L’ (My Alsace, 85n6 Hansi), 2 Australasia, 139–140

© The Author(s) 2017 253 E. O’Sullivan, A. Immel (eds.), Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8 254 INDEX autostereotypes, 8, 10, 63 Bowles & Carver, 33–34, 36–38, 37f, Avis for Børn (magazine), 111–119, 44n5 118f, 121–125 boys, characterized, 20, 170–171, Avise-Contoiret, 117 178–179 See also gender brachycephalic skull shape, 79–80 B Bradford, William, 242 Bachelard, Gaston, 76 Brantley-Newman, Vanessa, 2 Balling, Emmanuel, 117 Bratishki, 205, 206 banned books, 222–223 Braumann, Franz, 229 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 65, 135 Braun & Schneider – Bauer, Walter, 228–229 (publishers), 89 90 – Bavarian children’s books, 89–105 Brian, Amanda M., 8, 14, 17 19, – Beaumont, Jeanne-Marie Leprince 89 105 de, 135, 145n3 British Association for the beauty and race, 144 Advancement of Science, Bei v. baraban, 196 ethnological subsection, 79 Belaney, Archibald S. (Grey Owl British, depictions of, 65, 80, 136 pseud.), 225, 228 Brown, Penny, 116 belonging, national, 8 Bruno, G. (pseud. of Augustine Berquin, Arnaud, 131, 134–135 Tuillerie Fouillée), 236, 246f, Bevan, Favell Lee, see Mortimer, Favell 249n1 Lee (Far Off guides) Tour de France par deux enfants, – Bewick, Thomas, 32–33, 42 244 248 Bhabha, Homi, 152 Bunbury, Henry, 33 Bildung, 239 Buriatiia, 199 – Bildungsroman, 238, 249n3 Busch, Wilhelm, 89, 178 179 binary oppositions, 39, 45n10, 61, 80, 152 biological development, theories C of, 79 Cafrérie (South African tribe), 143 Birthday Cake for General Washington Call of the Wild (London), 221–222 (Ganeshram), 2 Camden, William, 42 Blackmore, Richard, 67n9 Campe, Joachim Heinrich, 122 Blake, James W., 173 Canada Blockhaus am Schlangensee, Das escapism to, 216–219 (Wilkes), 226 images of, 20, 215–231 Bobka ﬁzkul’turnik, 192f National Socialists and, agenda Bohm, Arnd, 219–220 of, 225–227 Bond, James (character), 43 as training ground, 224–227 Bopp, Franz, 85n12 caricatures, 3, 33, 17, 90–92 Boris, Otto, 227 caricaturists, 191 INDEX 255

Caroline Matilda (princess), 112 commerce and geography, 142–145 Cartesian perspectivalism, 31 Comstock, Anthony, 184 Catlin, George, 77–78 conduct literature, 130 Celts, 79–81 Conker’s Bad Fur Day (Ze Professor Charmes de l’enfance et les plaisirs de von Kriplespac), 43 l’amor maternel, Les (Jauffret), constructs, cultural-religious, 151 130–133 contrast, 39–44, 53, 61–64 Chicago Tribune, 92 “Contrast, The” (Rowlandson), 40 child/children, 7, 32–33, 74–75, 170 cosmopolitanism, 6 vs. adult, 22n10 Cosmorama (Aspin), 71 as audience, 10, 15, 34, 36, 90, 93, costumes, 12, 71, 197–203 105n4, 116, 130, 171, 237, 244 Costumes, Manners, and Pecularities of ideational, 84 Different Inhabitants of the notional, 74–75 Globe, 67n11 presence in image, 63 “Costumes of Nations for Infant as readers, 116, 124 Schools”, 12, 18, 53, 59–61, 60f, childhood, middle-class, 175 63–64 children’s prints, 29–44 Courrier des adolescents child savers, see reformers (Jauffret), 145n3 China, 85n9, 206 Courrier des enfants (Jauffret), 145n3 Chinese, 16, 59, 60f, 61, 105n4 Coutts, Angela Burdett, 84n5 Chinese Exhibition, Hyde Park Crimean War (1853–1856), 81 Corner, 72 Cruikshank, George, 33 Christensen, Nina, 3, 8, 17, 19, Cruikshank, Isaac, 33 111–125 Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, 72 Christian imagology, 160 Crystal Palace that Fox Built, The Christiansborg (West (Gilbert), 72, 73f, 84 Africa), 121–122 cultural geography, 12, 53 Christian VII (king of Denmark), 112, cultural narratives, 7 114 cultural-religious constructs, 151 circus themes, 98 cultural representations, 13 class, 90, 92, 99, 170, 175 cultural similarity and difference, 3, climate and national identity, 81 7–8, 18–19, 57–58, 61, 63, “Climates of the Earth”, 18, 53, 65–66 56–59, 57f, 64 culture climate theory, 45n6, 57–59, 62, 67n9 dominant, status of, in text, 152 clothing differences, 62, 78 colonial conquest, 59 comedy, 14, 34 D Comenius, Jan, 244–245 dandy (character) comic figures, 193–196 in Aufgepaßt!, “Der Mohr” (The comics, elements of, 169–170 Moor), 100, 102f 256 INDEX dandy (character) (cont.) Discours sur l’origine et les fondements as commonality of man, 103–104 de l’inégalité parmi les hommes in “Der Raucher” (The (Rousseau), 121 Smoker), 100, 101f displacement, 237–238 in Gigerls Freude und Leid, 100 Doctor Faustus, 43 Dandy’s Joy and Pain, The (Gigerls dolichocephalic skull shape, 79–80 Freude und Leid), 99–100 dolls, 18, 76–81 Danish, see Denmark Dolls and Sights of the Crystal Palace Danske Skoelemester, Den, (The Danish (Routledge), 77, 79, 82, 83f Schoolmaster), 114, 116, 125n1 drama, educational, 10, 17, 134 Darton rolls, 64, 66n6, 67n7 Dr. No, 43 Darwinism, 96 Dufresnoy, Nicolas Lenglet, 131, 135, “Day in the Country, A” (Trick or 145n4–145n5 Treat), 92, 99 Dutch dead, journey to, 236 and English, 40–41, 41f Defoe, Daniel, 35–36, 236, 238–239 “Dutch Gratitude Display’d”, 45n12 Denmark, 136 Dutch historical fiction, 23n11 18th century magazines in, 19, Dutch, images of, 14, 18, 40–42, 41f, 111–125 45n11–45n12, 59, 60f, 61–64 Deti narodov S.S.S.R., 197 Dzhanik i Kiriusha, 200–201 Deti vostochnych kolkhozov, 198 Dzhimmi Dzhoi v. gosti k Detki raznotsvetki, 208 pioneram, 207 Detskii internatsional, 203, 204f Dzin’-Fu-Fun, 207 Devochki SSSR, 198 Dicey, Cluer (publisher), 33 Dicey, William (publisher), 33 E Dickens, Charles, 72–74, 85n9 Echali rebiata, 205 difference(s), 1, 58, 155 economic themes, 200, 248 among nationalities, 75–78, 78f, 82 Eco, Umberto, 13 concept of, 6, 8, 17, 90, 149, 184, Edgeworth, Maria, 66n5, 130, 135, 236 145n7 diversity and, 21, 139 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, 66n5 friendship and, 21 education kinds of, 246 access to, 114–115 sameness and, 1, 8, 216–219, 236, of children, 111 240 drama and, 10, 17, 134–135 similarity and, 8, 216–219, 236, of fictional characters, 116–117 240 geography, Jauffret and, 133–134 See also otherness of girls, 144 Dirks, Rudolph, 169–170, 175–176, humanistic, 2 179 human rights and, 123 discernment, conventions of, 30–31 through magazines, 19, 52, 124 INDEX 257

tolerance and, 111 F young women’s, Jauffret on, 130 facial recognition, 29 See also prints, educational “familiar conversation”, 134–135 Egypt, 138, 140 family, national, 20, 238, Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, 71 243, 248 embedded documents, 237, 246, 248 Far Off guides (Mortimer), 6–7 emblematic symbols of Fenelon, François de, 236, 238 Christianity, 160 Fielding, Henry, 37 English Fine Crystal Palace the Prince Built, and Dutch, 40–41, 41f The (Newcombe), 74–76 English, images of, 18, 40–41, 41f, Fireside Facts from the Great 45n12, 59, 60f, 63 Exhibition (Newcombe), 77, Enlightenment, 3, 8, 17 79–81 enslaved Americans, 77–78 Fliegende Blätter, 89–90 See also slavery food, 36–39, 206–207 environment and human foreigners, 2, 14, 17, 65 characteristics, 96 Fores, Samuel William equality, 119, 121, 123, 206 (printseller), 33 escapism, 217–220, 221–222, 224 Forrest, Theodosius, 37–38 Essays on Physiognomy (Lavater), 36 Foucault, Michel, 79, 85n12 ethical discovery, voyages of Fouillée, Augustine Tuillerie (pseud. (Vallone), 65 Bruno, G.), 244–248 ethnicity/ethnic groups, 59, 71, Fox, Charles, 84n7 79–81, 93 Franco-Prussian War, 20, 237, 244 and gender diversity, 39, 45n8, Frankfurt, Treaty of, 244 201–203 Frederik VI (king of Denmark), 112, and national characteristics, 61–64, 113f 77 Freibeuter unter dem Nordlicht ethnocentrism, 17 (Kraus), 226 ethnography, 8, 11, 18 Freinthal, Kate, 225–226 Ethnological Society, 79 French, 14–15, 18, 39, 59, 60f, 63, ethnology, 79 80, 136–137 See also anthropology “French Liberty—British Slavery” ethnotypes, 13–15, 18, 53, 62, 66n3 (Gillray), 40 Eurocentrism, 12, 64, 145 “Frenchman in Billingsgate, Europe The”, 45n8 map of, 67n8 “Frenchman at Market, The”, 45n8 south central, 91 French Revolution, 123, 130–131 Europeans, 77–78, 93–94, 140–142 friendship and difference, 21 Evreiskii kolkhoz, 199 frontier, Canada as, 224 exhibits, ethnic and national, 77, 84n2 Für brave Kinder (For Good Children, exoticization, 156–158 Meggendorfer), 93 258 INDEX

G “Great Eggs and Bacon, The” London Ganeshram, Ramin, 2 Labour and the London Poor gender, 39, 45n10, 229 (Mayhew), 85n15 and ethnic differences, 39, 45n8, Great Exhibition of 1851, 8–9, 18, 216–219 71–88, 84n2 stereotypes of, 203, 224 Grenby, Matthew, 67n11, 116 gender-specific roles, 216–219, 242 Grey Owl, biography of, 227–228 genealogy and anthropology, 78–81 Grey Owl (pseud. of Belaney, Genlis, Madame de, 130, 134 A. S.), 225–226 geographical societies, Gruber, Hans (Die Hard), 43 European, 66n1 Grünau, Werner von, 223 geographical visualization, 152, 153f, Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 236 161 Gute Bekannte (Good Friends, geography, study of, 12, 19, Meggendorfer), 91, 97–98, 104 51, 55–56, 131–134, 142–143 geometric perspective, 30 H geopolitical fiction, 221 Haas, Georg, 113f George I (king of England), 42 Haeckel, Ernst, 96 George IV (king of England), 66n2 Hall, Stuart, 7 German images of Canada, 218–219 Hansi, Oncle (pseud.), see Waltz, Jean- German imagology, 46n13 Jacques Germans, 18, 20, 43–44, 79–81, Harris’s Cabinet of Amusement and 92, 95, 97 Instruction, 67n11 Germany, reunification of, 150 Hawaiian Islands, see Sandwich Islands Gigerls Freude und Leid Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 81 (Meggendorfer), 99–100 heterodiegetic narrative, 11 Gilbert, John, 72, 73f, 75 heteroimagology, 8, 215–231 Gillray, James, 32, 39–40 heterostereotypes, 10, 44, 63 girls, 19 Hier fängt die Welt noch einmal an education of, 144 (Pantenberg), 228 See also gender Higonnet, Margaret R., 3–4, 16, 20, Glasenapp, Gabriele von, 3–4, 8, 17, 235–250 19–20, 149–163 History of All Nations (Bewick), 33, 42 Glauben hat viele Namen, 159f History of Man, The, 79 Gmelin, Dr., 79 History of Plymouth Plantation Gobel, Erik, 122 (Bradford), 242 Godwin, William, 2 Hitler, Adolph, 227 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 92 Hoenselaars, Ton, 53 “Goodness Not Confined to Hoffman, Heinrich, 104 Complexion or Form” (Hurry), 2 Hogan’s Alley (Outcault), 171–172 Grand Tour, 51, 60 Hogarth, William, 33, 37–39 INDEX 259

Holck, Hans, 117 of othering, 97–98 Hope Leslie (Sedgwick), 238–243, 248 pleasure reading and, 17 Horina, Hans, 92 propaganda and, 17 House that Paxton Built, The, 74 of religious life, 150 Huber, Armin Otto, 226 of self, 149 Huckleberry Finn (character), 170 of S.S.S.R. ethnic groups, 197–198 Hugo, Victor, 30 and text, 16, 19 human characteristics and climate imaginative travel, 17 theory, 57–58 imagology, 9–10, 13–14, 18–20, 31, humanistic education, 2 42–43, 46n13, 51, 53–54, human rights and education, 123 61–62, 98, 154, 160, 215–231 humor, 2, 14, 16, 90–92 Im Circus (Meggendorfer), 98 Hunters and Fishers (Sinnett), 80 Immel, Andrea, 1–23 Hurry, Mrs. Ives, 2 Immer Lustig! (Meggendorfer), hypertext, 247 91–92, 98 immigrant street child, 20 imperialism, 8, 18–19, 94–95, 97 I Indian culture (south Asian), 76–77, iconography, 14, 67n12, 155 80, 84n2 See also image(s) Indians (Native Americans), 77–78, ideal citizen, 119, 124–125 231n7, 242 ideational child v. real child, 84 industry books, 193, 199–200 identity, 6, 8, 82, 116 information books, religious, 18–19, Soviet, 187, 196–197 149 ideology, 17, 149–150 information picturebooks, 160 Illick, Joseph, 175 Institut für Jugendbuchforschung Illustrated London News, The, 76–77 (Frankfurt), 150 illustrations instructional agenda for role of, 9–10, 151, 160, 163n12, children, 74–75 191, 210 interactivity and representation, 9–10 status of, 160 interculturalism, 200–201, 216 image(s) Internationaler Circus acquisition of, 31–34 (Meggendorfer), 98 alternative viewpoints and, 64–66 internationalism, 8, 19–20, 203, 205, analysis of, 16, 31, 52 210 by format, 17–18 internationalism (Enlightenment), 3, Grand Tour and, 51 8, 17 ideology and, 17 International Workers’ Day, 207 on lottery sheets, 33–34 intertextual games, 237 of national characteristics, 51–67 Introductory Lectures to the Subjects in (see also speciﬁc nations, the Rudiment Box, 55, 62 nationalities) Ireland, 67n7 260 INDEX

Irish, 22n10 Jay, Martin, 31 Islam, 150, 156 Jeu zoologique et géographique (card isolationism, 205 game) (Jauffret), 132 Italian Renaissance, 30 John Bull (personification), 34, 44 Italy, 136–137 journey to the dead, 236 J. F. Schreiber (publisher), 90 Judaism and religious J publishing, 150 Jauffret, Louis-François Juvenile Travellers, The fi achievements of, 129 (Wake eld), 17, 71 as anthropologist, 131–132, 138–139, 142 as author, 129–130 K Charmes de l’enfance et les Kamamalu (queen of Sandwich plaisirs de l’amor maternel, Islands), 66n2, 131 Les, 130–133 Kamehameha II (king of Sandwich child development and, 129 Islands), 66n2 dialogues by, geography education Kant, Immanuel, 123 and, 133–134 Kaspar, 91–92 early life of, 130–131 Kasperl in Afrika (Meggendorfer), 98 Géographie dramatique de la Katzenjammer Kids, The jeunesse, 129–145 (Dirks), 169–170, 175–176, Jeu zoologique et géographique 179 (card game), 132 Kem byt’, 193, 194f magazines of, 145n3 Khlebozavod Nr. 3, 193 Nouveau théâtre de I’éducation pour Khlopok, 199 faire suite, 134 Kindes erstes Buch, Des priorities for, 130 (Meggendorfer), 94, 104 promenades and festivals, 133 Kipp, Friedrich, 225–227 Société des Observateurs de Kitai, 206 l’Homme and, 129 Kleine Kinderbibliothek, 122 spontaneous conversations Koepp, Cynthia J., 3–4, 8, 10, 14, 17, structured in, 135–136 19, 129–145 on the study of geography, 131 Konashevich,Vladimir, 197 Voyage au jardin des plants, 132 Kraus, Robert, 226 Voyages de Rolando et ses Kriplespac, Ze Professor von, Conker’s compagnons de fortune, Bad Fur Day (video game, Les, 132 2001), 43 work with “wild child of Krøll, Bendix, 125n1 Aveyron”, 129 Kurze Beschreibung der in Europa young women’s education and, 130 Befintlichen Völckern und Ibren Zoographie des diverses régions, 132 Aigenschaften, 61–64 INDEX 261

L loyalty, political, 41 Lamb, Charles, 32 Lüdtke, Helga, 95 Lane’s Telescopic View of the Interior of Lutheran monarchy, 112 the Great Industrial Exhibition, 74 language M development, and ethnicity, 79 Macauley, Lord, 75 of humor, 91–92 Madlenka (Sís), 1, 3–5, 5f, 6, 9–13, Laplanders, 59, 60f, 61, 63, 67n11, 71 16, 21, 22n9 Lap, see Laplanders Magawisca, 243 Last of the Mohicans (Cooper), 239 See also Hope Leslie (Sedgwick) Latham, Robert Gordon, 81 magazines, 19, 111–127 Lathey, Gillian, 3–4, 8–9, 17–18 Mai i Oktiabrina, 207 Laursen, Christian, 123 Mai, Manfred, 152 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 36 Malen’kii chernyi Murzuk, 206 Lawlor, Charles, 173 maps, 152, 158, 236, 245, 246f, 247 leadership, aspiration to, 207 Marathon Man (Szell), 43 Leatherstocking Tales (Cooper), 218, Marlowe, Christopher, 43 230n3 Masaki, Tomoko, 84n6 Leerssen, Joep, 13, 45n10, 53, 66n3 Mattsperger, Meldchior, 114 Leichner, Georg, 226–227 Max und Moritz (Busch), 178–179 Le Men, Segolene, 245 Mayhew, London Labour and the Liberty Infant School (Dublin), 66n6 London Poor, “The Great Eggs librarians, 95 and Bacon”, 85n15 Lidchi, Henrietta, 8 May, Karl, 218–219 lineage of humankind, 77 Meggendorfer-Blätter, 89–90, 92 linguistic development, 79 Meggendorfer, Lothar, 90–92 linguistic identities, 82 ambiguity, 103–104 Linnaean classiﬁcation, 79 illustrations by, 18–19 Linnaeus, Carl, 77 movable picturebooks and, 99, 103 Little Enquirer, The (Anon.), 64 on race, 90–91, 94, 96–98, 96f–97f, Little Henry’s Holiday at the Great 100, 103–104 Exhibition (Newcombe), 77, Meggendorfer, Lothar, works of 79, 81 Aufgepaßt! (Watch Out!), 94, Little Traveller, The (Steerwell), 51, 99–100, 103 52f, 61–63, 66n2 “Day in the Country, A”, 99 London, Jack, 221–222 Des Kindes erstes Buch (The Child’s London Labour and the London Poor First Book), 94, 104 (Mayhew), “Great Eggs and Gigerls Freude und Leid (The Bacon, The”, 85n15 Dandy’s Joy and Pain), 99–100 Long Lance, Chief Buffalo Child, 226 Gute Bekannte (Good Friends), 91, lottery sheets, 33–34, 38 97–98, 104 262 INDEX

Meggendorfer, Lothar, works of Mortimer, Favell Lee (Far Off guides), (cont.) 6–7 Immer Lustig! (Always Jolly!), Motu und Miromotu (Boris), 227 91–92, 95, 99 Mountie stories, 229 Internationaler Circus, 98 movable books, 99, 103 Kasperl in Afrika, 98 “Mr. Fatman’s Mishap” Nimm mich mit! Ein lehrreiches (Meggendorfer), 90 Bilderbuch (Take with You!), multiculturalism, 10–11 95–96, 96f–97f, 98 multinationalism, 197–201 Nur für brave Kinder [Only for Münchener Bilderbogen, 89–90 Good Children], 92 mutual aid, 248 Princess Rose-Petal and Her mutual respect, 137 Advenures, 98 “Raucher, Der” (The Smoker), 100 Von Früh bis Spät, 104n1 N menagerie, themes of, 98 Napoleon Bonaparte (“Boney”), 34 Men of the Last Frontier (Grey Owl), narratives, cultural, 7, 11, 116 225–226 Nasha ulita, 190f mesaticephalic skull shape, 85n11 Nashi tropiki, 199 Metz, Christian, 44n1 national character, 51–67, 81 Mexican culture, 77 national and ethnic displays, 76–78 Mexico, 140–141 national family, 20, 237, 243, 248 Meyer, Silke, 3–4, 8–9, 14, national identity, 7–8, 61–64, 81–82, 17–18, 62, 80, 93 90, 93, 235, 239, 246 military training, 226–227 nationalism, 93 Mills, Alfred, 66n4 German, 18–19, 94–95 miniaturization, trope of, 76 nationality and ethnic identity, 82 Minor’s Magazine, The, 79 nationalized character traits, 35–36 mission tales, 207–208 national portrayals, 18, 19 modernity, 44n1, 191, National Socialism/National 193, 248 Socialists, 222–225, 228, 231n7 modernization, 199, 207 agenda of, 225–226 “Mohr, Der” (The Moor) in national stereotypes, 18, 31, 34–44, Aufgepaßt!, 100, 102f, 103 45n7, 203–204, 206–207 Mongols, 81 Native Americans, 77–78, 242 monogenesis, 79 nativism and stereotypes, 181 “Monsieur François” (Bowles & Natural History of the Varieties of Man Carver), 38 (Latham), 81 “Monsieur from Paris” (Bowles & nature, portrayal of, 224–225 Carver), 38 “Negergigerl, Der” Lustiges Mon Village (My Village, Hansi), 2 Automaten-Theater, 103 Morozhenoe, 193–196 neurobiology, 29–30 INDEX 263

Newcombe, Samuel Prout, 74–75, oppositions, binary, see binary 77–81, 85n13–85n14 oppositions new human being, 189, Orbis sensualium pictus (Comenius), 191, 193 244–245 New Moral System of Geography, A Order of Things, The (Foucault), 79 (Riley), 41–42 orientation, 34–35, 44 New York Journal, 169 orphanhood, 236, 248–249 New York, N. Y., 12, 21, 22n4 Ortega y Gasset, José, 236 New-York Tribune, 90 O shesterych vot ėtich, 206 New York World, 171–172 O’Sullivan, Emer, 3–4, 9, 12, 14, Nières, Isabelle, 237 17–18, 22n5, 90–91 Nimm mich mit! (Meggendorfer), 104 othering, 8, 29, 36–39, 44, 152, Nixon, John, 39–40 187–188 Nora, Pierre, 236 in Meggendorfer, 89, 93, 95, nordicity, 223–224 97–98, 104 North Africans, 97 otherness Notes and Sketches of Lessons on Subjects as biological fact, 39 Connected with the Great Bruno on, 246 Exhibition, 75 Canada and Germany, 216–219 notional children, 74–75 concept of, 75–76 Nouveau théâtre de éducation pour economic relevance and, 200 faire suite à ceux de.. in Hope Leslie, 241 (Jauffret), 134 leading role in, 206 Nubia, 140 maps and, 236 Nur für brave Kinder [Only for Good in Skazka o tolstom shucmane i ob Children], 92 uchenom doktore, 203–204 social, 193 stereotypes and, 161, 201–203 O See also difference(s) – Oberländer, Adolph, 89 Outcault, Richard F., 169 170, 176 obscene materials, distribution of, 184 Overbury, Thomas, 35 observation, modes of, 248 Overton, Henry, 33 observer, identity of, 10 See also spectant(s); spected occupational identity, 91 P October Revolution of paintings, northern European, 30–31 1917, 187–188, 207 panoramic perception, 29–30 Odd People (Reid), 79–80 Pantenberg, V., 228 Odysseus (character), 236, 238 paradigm shift, 150 Oktiabrenok postrelenok, 191 paratext, 151, 154 Oktiabr’skie pesenki, 193 Paulin, Lotra, 116 Opper, Frederick Burr, 175–176 Paxton, Joseph, 84n7 264 INDEX

People of All Nations (Mills), 66n4 prejudice, 2 Persia, 137–138 Princess Rose-Petal and Her perspectivalism, Cartesian, 31 Adventures (Meggendorfer), 98, perspective 105n4 geometric, 30 prints narrative, 11 designed for children, 32–33 reﬂective, 30–31 educational, 18, 66n5 spectant, 10 in European visual culture, 32 Peruvians, 138, 141 as genre, and deﬁning of identity, 35 Pesnia o Mame, 193, 195f popular, 18, 32–33, 40 picturebooks/picture books, 15, 17, Progressive Era, 20, 170 19–20, 80 progress, technological, 189, 191 modern, 16, 208, 210 Proizvodstvennye knigi (industry Russian, 11, 188 books), 193, 199 pictures promotion, 114 role of, 156 propaganda, 14, 17–18, 40 See also illustrations pull-tab books, 91–92, 94 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, 100 Punch, 91–92 Pioneers, as future warriors, 203, 206 Punch (magazine), 72 Pioneers, Second International puppets, 91–92 Congress of, 204–205 Pitt, William (the younger), 34 Pleasant Pages, 77 R Pluche, Abbé, 131–132 race Pochta (Marshak), 209f, 210 beauty and, 140 Poezd v. Kazakhstan, 199 class and, 18–19, 99 “Politeness” (Gillray), 40 Meggendorfer and, 90–91, 94, political consciousness, stereotypes 96–98, 96f–97f, 100, 103–104 and, 80–81, 197 racial identity, 59, 82 political educatlon, through railway travel, 29–30 illustrations, 32–33, 191, 192f, Ravier, Thèrese, 141–143, 145 193 RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted political propaganda, 40 Police), 229 polygenesis, 79 reading, context of, 117, 156 Portuguese, 59, 60f reading habits, 95, 111, 116 positions, relative, 78 recognition value, 216–219 postcolonial perspective, 163n11 recreational stories, 18, 52 “Pound and the Shilling, The”, 72 reform, 123 Practical Education (Edgeworth and reformers, 177 Edgeworth), 66n5 Reid, Mayne, 79–80 pragmatic communication, 155, 161 relativism, national or cultural, 17 Prahl, Niels, 117 religion(s), 19–20, 152–153 INDEX 265

nature of, 161 Ruthner, Clemens, 58 religious book publishing, 150–151, Rutschmann, Verena, 3, 8, 11, 14, 17, 162n2 20, 187–214 religious information books, 149–151, 163–164 religious information S picturebooks, 160 Saguisag, Lara, 3–4, 8, 17, 20, 90 religious similarity and diversity, 201, “Sailors, English, Dutch, French” 240–241 (Bowles & Carver), 40–42, 41f Renaissance, Italian, 30 sameness and difference, 1, 8, reprographic technology, 151 216–219, 236, 240 Retzius, Anders, 79, 85n11 Sami, see Laplanders Riis, Joseph, 171, 180 Sandwich Islands, 61, 66n2 Riksha iz Shankhaia, 206 Saxony, 136 Riley, George, 41–42 Scenes in the Life of a Masher Rivier, Amar de, 131 (Meggendorfer), 99 road narratives, 236, 238 Scenes in …. series (Taylor), 17, 71 “Roast Beef of Old England, O the” Schachner, Judy, 2 (Bowles & Carver), 36–38 Schemm, Hans, 225 Roberts, Charles G. D., 221 Schlözer, August Ludwig Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 236 von, 119–120, 123 Romani language, 199 In Schnee und Eis (Kipp), 226–227 Romantic era, 17 Schneller als RCMP (Huber), 226 Romanticism, rise of, 46n13 Schwarzen Wasser von Anahim, Die Ross, Colin, 221, 223 (Braumann), 229 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 121 scopic regime, 44n1 Routledge (publisher), 74 Scots, 59 Rowlandson, Thomas, 33, 40, 71 Scott, A. O, 12 Royal Geographcial Society Sedgwick, Catharine, 236–243 (London), 66n1 seeing, 10–11, 29–31, 44 Royal Road to Reading through the Seifert, Martina, 3, 8–9, 14, 16–17, Great Exhibition, The 20, 215–231 (Newcombe), 74 selection and coverage, of speciﬁc Rudiment Box, 53, 66n6, 67n8, groups, 11–12, 59–61, 60f 67n10 selfhood, 16 Rudiment Box script, 55–56 self-identity, 235 Russia, 81, 138 self-image, 236 Russian identity, 20 self and other, 187–188 Russian picturebooks, 11, 20, Seton, Ernest Thompson, 221 187–188 seven deadly sins, 35–36, 45n6, 62 Russians, 80–81 Severnyi mai, 198 Russophobia, 81 shilling days, 72, 84n3 266 INDEX

Short Description of the Peoples of of multinationalism, 80, 197–201 Europe and Their Characteristics, national, 18, 31, 34–44, 45n7, 59, 61–64 60f, 203–204, 206–207 On the Sidewalks of New York, 20, nativism and, 181 22n10, 169–184, 176f, 178f, 19th century, 83 182f and otherness, 161, 201–203 Sinnett, Mrs. Percy, 80 political consciousness and, 80–81, Sís, Peter, 1, 3, 6, 16, 21, 21n2, 197 22n3–22n4, 22n6, 22n8 popular prints and, 18 Skazka o Pete tolstom rebenke i o Sime, recontextualization of, 188 kotoryi tonkii, 196 of religious characters, 158 Skazka o tolstom shucmane i ob structure of, 34 uchenom doktore, 203–204 text-image relationship and, 161 Skaz pro Severnyi Kavkaz, 198 See also autostereotypes; Skippyjon Jones (character), 2 heterostereotypes skull shapes, 79–80 Stol, 193 slavery, 2, 77–78, 121–122 Struensee, Johann Friedrich, 112 Smoker, The (“Der Raucher”), 100 Struwwelpeter, 196 Socialism, National, see National Stürumvögel, 223 Socialism/National Socialists Styria, 62 Socialist Realism, 188 subjected people, 2 socialist society, 189 subscribers’ list, 114 socialization, 36–39, 98 “Sue Welﬂeet’s Bargain”, 45n8 social otherness, 193 superiority, cultural, 82 Société des Observateurs de Swift, Jonathan, 236 l’Homme, 129 Switzerland, images of, 137 “Soup Meagre, Frogs and Salad” Szell, Christian, 43 (Bowles & Carver), 38–39, 38f Szerszynski, Bronislaw, 6 Soviet identity, 187, 196–197 space compression, 16–17 spaciousness, 223 T Spaniards, 59, 61–62, 67n12 tableau of nationalities (Völkertafel), spectant(s), 10, 12, 14 61–64 spected, 10–11, 22n10 Taylor, Isaac, 17, 71 Stanzel, Franz Karl, 54, 61–62 technology, 189, 191, 197 Steedman, Carolyn, 84 Tegg, Thomas, 33 Steerwell, James (pseud.), 51 Telemachus, 236, 238 stereotypes text–image relationship, 2, 7, 155, functions of, 34–35 161, 244 of gender, 203, 224 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 32, 34 handbook of, 96 Thatcher effect experiment, 29 juxtaposition of, 39–40, 196–197 Theophrastus, 35 INDEX 267 time–space compression, 16–17 U tobacco consumption, 40–41 Ungerer, Tomi, 2 Todorov, Tzvetan, 115–116 United States, 219, 224 tolerance, 119–121, 125 See also Americans alternative viewpoints Unity and Diversity of Europe (Ortega providing, 64–66 y Gasset), 236 Avis for Børn (Newspaper for universalism, 111–125, 189 Children) and, 112, 117, urban ills, 20, 177 119–121, 123 urbanization, 170 distinction between cultures and, 152 urban life, 20 education of children and, 111 urchin, street, 170 18th century magazines in Denmark Urry, John, 6, 16–17 and, 111–125 utopian image, 219–220 Higgonet on, 249 in Hope Leslie, 243 as ideal, 151 transnationalism and, 17 V Tom Bailey (character), 170 Vallone, Lynn, 65 Tom Sawyer (character), 170 vanguard nation, 206 topographic maps, 245 Vanya v Kitae, 207 Tour de France par deux enfants, Le Vchera i segodnia, 189, 191, 193 – (Bruno), 236, 244–248, 249n1 Victorian era, 6 7 transformational intent of View of the Habits of Most Countries in literature, 116–117 the World, A (Anon.), 12 – transnationalism, 5, 17, 93, 111, 124 viewing prints in boyhood, 31 32 – transport, modes of, 248 Voina igrushek, 196 197 travel, 29–30, 235–250, 246f, 249 Völkertafel (tableau of – “Travellers’ Wonders” (Aikin and nationalities), 61 64 Barbauld), 65 Voltaire, 121 Travels into Several Remote Nations of Voyage au jardin des plants the World (Swift), see Gulliver’s (Jauffret), 132 Travels (Swift) Voyages de Rolando et ses compagnons “Tria Juncta In Uno, or: The Three de fortune (Jauffret), 132 Enemies of Brittain” (Nixon), 40 Voyages de Télémaque (Fenelon), 236, triangle trade, Danish, 121–122 238 Trick or Treat, 92, 99 “True-Born Englishman, The” (Defoe), 35–36 W Trumpener, Katie, 6 Wakeﬁeld, Priscilla, 17, 71 Turkestansii chlopok, 199 Waltz, Jean-Jacques (pseud. Oncle Turkish people, 59, 60f, 61, 137–138 Hansi), 2 Tyrolian region, 94 Weimar Republic, 20 268 INDEX

Weisse Indianer, Der (Bauer), X 228–229 xenophobia, 6–7 Wellington, Duke of, 72 Welsch, Wolfgang, 152 Weststeijn, Thijs, 83 Wilderspin, Samuel, 54–55, 66n5 Y Wilkes, Ferdinand, 226 Yates, Edmund, 71–72 William Darton and Son (ﬁrm), 52 women authors, vision of, 248 Woodward, George Moutard, 33 work ethic, 193 Z work as unifying element, 198–199 Zoographie des diverses régions World’s Fair, The, 75, 81 (Jauffret), 132–133