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The Development of a Genre for Young Female Readers, 1740-1800 Wilfrid Laurier University Scholars Commons @ Laurier Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive) 2018 Girls’ Voices of the Eighteenth Century: The Development of a Genre for Young Female Readers, 1740-1800 Sarah Rangaratnam [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/etd Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Rangaratnam, Sarah, "Girls’ Voices of the Eighteenth Century: The Development of a Genre for Young Female Readers, 1740-1800" (2018). Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive). 2104. https://scholars.wlu.ca/etd/2104 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive) by an authorized administrator of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact [email protected]. GIRLS’ VOICES OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF A GENRE FOR YOUNG FEMALE READERS, 1740-1800 by Sarah Rangaratnam B.A. Translation (Hons.), York University, 1998 M.A. Comparative Literature, Brock University, 2010 Ph.D. DISSERTATION Submitted to the Department of English and Film Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Doctor of Philosophy in English and Film Studies Wilfrid Laurier University © Sarah Rangaratnam 2018 Abstract Just as they do today, adolescent girls functioned as a cultural force in the eighteenth century, and it was commercially viable for authors and publishers to attract and sustain the attention of these teenaged readers. Girls’ Voices of the Eighteenth Century: The Development of a Genre for Young Female Readers, 1740-1800, examines how four female authors leveraged elements of fairy tales, romances and gothic fiction, and developed dialogue and humour in their texts, to reflect the interests and literary awareness of their target audience of adolescent girls. My study begins with an investigation of the legacy of early French fairy tales in these texts, particularly in the work of Sarah Fielding, who was inspired by the potential of the fairy tale form and its cast of female protagonists. I then study the work of Mary Ann and Dorothy Kilner, who demonstrated the adolescent’s increasing awareness of power imbalances in the larger, adult world, and gave voice to the underdog in class and gender hierarchies. Finally, I consider the voice of female characters in the texts of Ellenor Fenn, who was subversive in her use of fairy tale and gothic features, recognizing that both genres were popular in the period with adolescent readers. Fenn was especially unique for her conscious appropriation of teenage colloquial speech in an attempt to entertain and engage her youthful audiences. Fielding, Fenn, and the Kilners recognized the potential of a new genre of text – the real precursor, it could be argued, to the contemporary YA novel – in which narrative form was expressly tailored to appeal to and to address the adolescent girls themselves. As experienced pedagogues, their intimacy with the young people in their care provided insight into the experience of eighteenth-century youth. This understanding especially shines in their work for adolescent girls, in which dialogue is rich, and characters seem to speak for the first time in their own voices. i Table of Contents Abstract i Table of Contents iii List of Figures iv Introduction: Girls’ Voices in the Eighteenth Century 1 Chapter 1: Talking Fairies, Talking Mothers: 25 Early French Fairy Tales and their Influence on Eighteenth-Century Texts for Young Girls Chapter 2: Talking Pincushions: Mary Ann Kilner’s Toy Stories and Young Readers 57 Chapter 3: Talking Mice: Dorothy Kilner’s The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse, 99 Animal Narrators, and the Young Middle-Class Reader Chapter 4: Talking Girls: Teenage Dialogue, Humour, and Subjectivity in Ellenor Fenn’s 131 School Stories for Girls Conclusion 169 Works Cited 175 iii iv List of Figures Figure 1 Frontispiece from an early English translation of Perrault’s tales, with reference to 31 Mother Goose. Courtesy of the Internet Archive. Figure 2 Title Page and frontispiece of an early edition of The History of Little Goody Two 52 Shoes. Courtesy of the Internet Archive. Figure 3 Frontispiece and Title Page from a 1770 edition of Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket- 57 Book, Courtesy of the Internet Archive. Figure 4 Frontispiece and Title Page from 1785 edition of The Renowned History of Primrose 60 Prettyface. Courtesy of The Osborne Collection of the Toronto Public Library. Figure 5 Marshall’s June 1789 advertisement in the Times for Eleanor Fenn’s The Juvenile 61 Tatler and The Fairy Spectator, and a description of his new bookshop. Figure 6 Frontispiece and Title Page from an early edition of Kilner’s The Adventures of a 67 Pincushion, courtesy of the Internet Archive. Figure 7 Woodcut depicting an argument between Miss Sally and Miss Nelly, in Jemima 80 Placid; or the Advantage of Good-Nature, 28-29. Courtesy of The Hockcliffe Project. Figure 8 Woodcut depicting horse accident, in The Adventures of a Pincushion, 48. Courtesy 82 of GoogleBooks. Figure 9 Frontispiece and Title Page from early edition of Dorothy Kilner’s The Life and 99 Perambulation of a Mouse. Volume II. Courtesy of The Hockcliffe Project. Figure 10 Margery Two Shoes rescues and teaches Ralph the Raven and Tom the Pigeon to 118 read, in a 1785 edition of The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes. Courtesy of The Internet Archive. Figure 11 Mrs. Margery Two Shoes, with her animal friends about her, from a 1785 edition of 119 The History of Little Goody Two Shoes. Courtesy of The Internet Archive. Figure 12 Ellenor Fenn’s The Grammar Box, produced by John Marshall around 1783. 137 Courtesy of the Osborne Collection at the Toronto Public Library. Figure 13 Some of Jane Johnson’s Nursery Ephemera, Courtesy of Lilly Library, Indiana 138 University, Bloomington, Indiana. Figure 14 Example of dialogue in an early edition of Fenn’s Cobwebs to Catch Flies. 139 Courtesy Toronto Public Library, Osborne Collection. Figure 15 Title Page and Frontispiece of The Fairy Spectator, 1789. Courtesy of Osgoode 149 Collection of Children’s Literature, Toronto Public Library. v Introduction In the last fifty years of the eighteenth century, the rise of the middle class and heightened concerns about women’s behaviour were reflected in literature produced for young people. Fiction for children became a site from which middle-class and domestic ideologies could be instilled, particularly in girl readers, and the children’s literature of the period has therefore developed a reputation for being conservatively didactic in nature. However, “didactic” has since been equated with “boring” in the world of children’s literature, especially since the Romantics idolized childhood as a time of natural openness, imagination and freedom from the rules of adult life. Charles Lamb famously summed up the Romantics’ poor opinion of late eighteenth- century children’s authors when he categorized them all as “that cursed Barbauld crew.” He was referring to Anna Laetitia Barbauld and her peers – women whose legacy has been their staunch didacticism. When it came to ideas about childhood, Mitzi Myers noted in the 1980s, the Romantics aligned themselves with Rousseau, venerating the innocent (and, she argued, ignorant) child, whereas most of the women authors Lamb so disliked had rejected many of Rousseau’s ideologies, specifically with respect to the education of girls. She states, “Georgian children were the locus of a revolutionary generation’s hopes and fears. No wonder improving books were constantly thrust into their hands, and no wonder women writers directed so much energy to formulating exemplary mothers and governesses” (Myers Impeccable 36). Myers asserts that enlightenment children’s texts written by women were greatly undervalued and understudied because their representations of childhood do not line up with that of the Romantics. Myers’ main concern was to resurrect children’s literature written by Georgian women – her argument being that their depictions of strong mother-figures and female teachers model the 1 “heroic potential in ordinary female life, in everyday female roles” for a generation of children, and reflect the increasing authority of mothers as a characteristic of the late enlightenment (Impeccable 50). She also notes that the use of children’s texts to teach this message indicates that Georgian female writers were confident the genre could serve as a site to address social issues and to effect change: With their homely plots where small actions have large moral implications and where women, children, and the lowly are taken seriously as moral agents, the little books tidily demonstrate women writers’ resourceful exploitation of the available literary and cultural conventions to suit their own ends. (Myers Impeccable 55) Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters stresses that sound female education is of the utmost importance in producing better mothers and wives, and this is where she draws away from Rousseau’s ideology. While both Rousseau and Wollstonecraft argued that educators of boys and girls should focus on knowledge that would be useful in adulthood, there is a difference in what each of them meant by “useful”. Rousseau’s argument in his 1762 Émile, or On Education, was that girls’ skills in adornment and attractiveness were most important to secure a male partner for protection, and therefore should be the focus for cultivation in the education
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