SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND CHILDHOOD IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY by Amanda Phillips Chapman B. A. in English, Troy University, 2004 M. A. in English, University of Alabama, 2009 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2015 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Amanda Phillips Chapman It was defended on April 13, 2015 and approved by Marah Gubar, PhD, Associate Professor, MIT Literature Nancy Glazener, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh English Thora Brylowe, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of Pittsburgh English Bruce McConachie, PhD, University of Pittsburgh Theater Arts Dissertation Advisor: Troy Boone, Phd, Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh English ii Copyright © by Amanda Phillips Chapman 2015 iii SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND CHILDHOOD IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY Amanda Phillips Chapman, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2015 My dissertation argues that self-consciousness should take its place beside innocence and precocity as one of a constellation of terms crucial for understanding how paradigms of childhood and children’s literature developed side by side. By focusing on attitudes towards children and self-consciousness, I illuminate the ways in which discourses for and about children affected not only children’s culture but also British culture at large. My chapters examine the positive value placed on self-consciousness in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century children’s literature; the reconceptualization of childhood and self-consciousness by Romantic writers, who attached a new anxiety about self-consciousness to the figure of the child; the incredible popularity of Peter Pan, which results from the eternal boy’s combination of unselfconsciousness and theatricality; and the ways in which the British public school ethic of good form as well as the literary tradition of the school story reflect increasingly stringent demands that children be unselfconscious. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE . VII 1.0 INTRODUCTION . .1 2.0 EXCHANGING MASKS FOR MIRRORS: THE SELF-CONSCIOUS CHILD IN THE LATE GEORGIAN ERA . .21 2.1 BEFORE THE MIRROR, THE MASK . .23 2.2 THE BOOK AS MIRROR . .30 2.3 THE DIARY AS MIRROR . 40 3.0 NO “SMACK OF HAMLET”: THE REJECTION OF SELF-CONSCIOUS CHILDHOOD . .53 3.1 CHARLES LAMB’S HAMLET . 56 3.2 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS . 61 3.3 ROUSSEAU, SCHILLER, AND THE CHILD . 67 3.4 COLERIDGE, WORDSWORTH, AND AN ANTI-SELF-CONSCIOUS CHILDREN’S LITERATURE . 74 3.5 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE IN TRANSITION: HOLIDAY HOUSE AND THE FAIRY BOWER . 79 v 4.0 THE RIDDLE OF PETER PAN’S EXISTENCE: AN UNSELFCONSCIOUS STAGE CHILD . .95 4.1 VICTORIAN ANTI-SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS . 97 4.2 CHILDREN, THEATER, AND SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS . .103 4.3 PETER PAN . 110 5.0 A “DISQUIETING REFLECTION”: GOOD FORM AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOL BOY . 125 5.1 THE CULT OF CHIVALRY AND BOYS’ LITERATURE . 130 5.2 THE SCHOOL STORY AND GOOD FORM . .140 5.3 THE MYTH OF THE SCHOOLBOY BURNOUT . .154 5.4 MORBID SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND PUBLIC SCHOOL GHOSTS 159 6.0 EPILOGUE . .168 NOTES . .175 BIBLIOGRAPHY . .189 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. “Children Playing With a Mask,” O. G. Rejlander (1894) . 27 Figure 2. “T is for Tot,” Oliver Herford, The Little Book of Bores (1900) . .105 Figure 3. Children acting the ‘Play Scene’ from “Hamlet,” Charles Hunt (1863) . 107 vii PREFACE Most of the work of this dissertation was supported by a Richard C. and Barbara N. Tobias Fellowship and a Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship. For the two years of living the dream of pure research and writing, I am immensely grateful to those who endowed these fellowships, those who so graciously granted them to me, and those who convinced them that they should— namely my wonderful committee members, who have by now written scads of recommendation letters on my behalf. Of course those same committee members—Troy Boone, Marah Gubar, Nancy Glazener, Thora Brylowe, and Bruce McConachie—have contributed to the completion of this dissertation in innumerable other ways that leave me lovingly indebted to them. I especially want to thank my advisor, Troy Boone, who told me two years ago, on the occasion of my choosing my dissertation topic, to go with the possibly crazy but definitely much more exciting option. He was right. Thanks are owed to the members of my writing group, who asked just the right questions and said all the encouraging things: I owe you, Swathi Sreerangarajan, Elizabeth Oliphant, and Jessica FitzPatrick. To Schuyler Chapman, the best I can do is say thank you and desperately hope I was just as supportive when it was your turn. And to Adlai: you and this dissertation got your start at about the same time; I’m proud of this book you kindly let me write, but I’m much more proud of you. viii 1.0 INTRODUCTION “[A]ll sin, my dear child, is thus formed in our hearts, sometimes long, long before it breaks out, it becomes us therefore, carefully to watch our thoughts…” -Mary Martha Sherwood, The History of the Fairchild Family (1818)1 “As a matter of fact, the natural child is an innocent, joyous, inconsequent thing, free from vanity, self-importance, and every form of self-consciousness.” -Ernest Dowson, “The Cult of the Child” (1894)2 Almost every survey of nineteenth-century British children’s literature remarks upon the inevitable presence of Mary Martha Sherwood’s The History of the Fairchild Family on the bookshelves of Victorian children. Though the story of the Fairchilds spanned three books written over the course of thirty years, the first volume in particular, published in 1818 and in print continuously for a century, seems to have been a fixture in the nursery. In part because of its ubiquity, when the end of the nineteenth century occasioned a host of retrospective reviews in popular periodicals of the last hundred years of children’s literature, critics tended to single out The Fairchild Family for especially acute condemnation. Given the post-Wordsworth reimagining of the child as a precious earthly manifestation of heavenly virtue,3 many of the criticisms leveled at Sherwood had to do with the strict Evangelicism of her text, which harped 1 on the natural depravity of her child characters. Most late-century detractors, for instance, pointed with horror to a scene in which Mr. Fairchild takes his young children to view the body of a man two days dead, employing the grisly spectacle as an object lesson in sin and death.4 It is not difficult to understand why an age dominated by the image of the child as a bright angel would shrink from such a scene. Harder to parse are the terms in which L. B. Lang, writing for Longman’s Magazine in 1893, censures the Fairchild parents—and, by extension, real life parents who continued to provide their children with copies of The Fairchild Family: One might have thought that the danger of self-consciousness arising from these perpetual religious conversations would have become obvious to the feeblest mind, but both parents appear to have regarded this unlucky habit as evidence of grace. The children are eternally watching themselves, probing themselves, writing down their bad thoughts, talking about themselves. It is Self, Self, Self from morning till night, and the more they talk about Self the more delighted their parents are….if people—and children—could forget themselves altogether, even if they sometimes forgot their faults too, both they and the world would be considerably the better. Nothing is so fatal to well-doing or well-being as the perpetual contemplation of self. But Mrs. Fairchild would consider these remarks rank heresy.5 Lang is not alone in this vein of criticism; a writer for The Quarterly Review thirty years earlier had excoriated Sherwood for her tendency to write the kind of pattern good boy who not only displays model behavior but furthermore, worse, is “able to make edifying remarks on his own conduct.”6 In what way is it dangerous for children’s literature to cause self-consciousness to arise in child readers? Why should a character in a child’s book not be able to reflect on his own conduct? What makes “Self, Self, Self” an apparently self-evident evil in a child’s book? Why is it desirable for children to “forget themselves altogether”? Mrs. Fairchild, and many 2 other parents and child-experts of the early nineteenth century, would indeed consider these remarks rank heresy, for, as I will show, they considered self-contemplation of paramount importance for children. So what changed between 1818 and 1893 to transform childhood self- consciousness from an agreed-upon good to a near-unanimously condemned evil? This book answers that question. In constructing an answer, my book argues that “self- consciousness” must take its place beside “innocence” and “precocity” as one of a constellation of terms crucial for understanding how paradigms of childhood and children’s literature developed side by side. I intend to broaden the field of inquiry in children’s literature studies and childhood studies to include historical factors in the construction of childhood and children’s literature that have been overshadowed by a prolonged focus on Victorian preoccupations with children’s sexuality and agency. Innocence is perhaps the most frequently interrogated of the terms applied to children in popular nineteenth-century discourse. As a critical focus within childhood studies, innocence tends to highlight questions about child sexuality and the denial of adult sexual knowledge to children. As any reader of Wordsworth knows, precocity in children was a principal nineteenth-century preoccupation.