UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Bower of Books: Reading Children in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/89q0q765 Author Browning, Catherine Cronquist Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Bower of Books: Reading Children in Nineteenth-Century British Literature By Catherine Cronquist Browning A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Ian Duncan, Chair Professor Catherine Gallagher Professor Paula Fass Fall 2013 Bower of Books: Reading Children in Nineteenth-Century British Literature © 2013 by Catherine Cronquist Browning Abstract Bower of Books: Reading Children in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Catherine Cronquist Browning Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Ian Duncan, Chair Bower of Books: Reading Children in Nineteenth-Century British Literature analyzes the history of the child as a textual subject, particularly in the British Victorian period. Nineteenth-century literature develops an association between the reader and the child, linking the humanistic self- fashioning catalyzed by textual study to the educational development of children. I explore the function of the reading and readable child subject in four key Victorian genres, the educational treatise, the Bildungsroman, the child fantasy novel, and the autobiography. I argue that the literate children of nineteenth century prose narrative assert control over their self-definition by creatively misreading and assertively rewriting the narratives generated by adults. The early induction of Victorian children into the symbolic register of language provides an opportunity for them to constitute themselves, not as ingenuous neophytes, but as the inheritors of literary history and tradition. The reading child’s mind becomes an anthology, an inherited library of influences, quotations, and textual traditions that he or she reshapes with uniquely imaginative critical force. The first chapter examines the nineteenth-century British reception of John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile. I demonstrate that Locke’s interest in cultivating skillful child readers, mediated through Rousseau’s fictional pupil, informs Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda and Walter Scott’s Waverley. Lockean educational discourse, combined with Rousseauean fictional strategies, serves as foundational for the early nineteenth century development of the novel. Chapter Two addresses childhood reading in the English Bildungsroman, interrogating the relationship between child protagonists who develop their identities through creative misreading and the ways that novels of growth and development shape their readers. Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and Maggie Tulliver balance their absorption in the reading experience with their imaginative reshaping of their childhood reading, rewriting the books they encounter as they gradually learn to form themselves as subjects. Chapter Three traces the influence of children’s books of natural history on the fantasy novels of Lewis Carroll and Charles Kingsley, with particular attention to the development of curiosity as a desirable trait for child readers. The child protagonists of natural history books, who serve as pedagogical models for child readers, inform the child protagonists of the fantasy novel, who model both successful reception of didactic instruction and comic failure to learn from their books. At the same time, the thematization of optical technology works together with the child’s perspective to 1 embed readerly experience in childhood perception. The final chapter turns to the autobiographical reflections of John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, and Edmund Gosse, investigating the metaphorical substitution of the acquisition of basic literacy for early childhood development and of canonical literacy for the development of identity over time. Each of these autobiographers defines himself through his ability to cultivate sublime readerly experience through re-reading. For Mill, the mature admiration that his father encourages in childhood reading must give way to a childish delight as an adult reader; for Gosse, his father’s strict religious philosophy is displaced by his enchantment with the sound of poetic language; and for Ruskin, the ability to forget his childhood reading enables him to take the same pleasure in books over and over again. 2 For my father and for my son. i Table of Contents Acknowledgements iii Chapter One Imaginary Pupils: Educational Philosophy in Romantic Fiction 1 Chapter Two “Reading as if for life”: Bookish Children in the Bildungsroman 33 Chapter Three Reading Curiosity: Natural History in the Victorian Child Fantasy Novel 62 Chapter Four Autobiography as Anthology: Re-Reading Victorian Childhoods 90 Bibliography 113 ii Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful to my advisor, Ian Duncan, whose seemingly limitless knowledge is matched only by his unbounded patience. His meticulous reading and detailed feedback helped me clarify and refine my ideas more thoroughly than I ever hoped to do. In addition, his unfailing generosity and constant availability supported me throughout the writing process. I am extremely fortunate to have had Catherine Gallagher as my second reader for this project. Her thoughtful commentary has contributed greatly to the quality of this dissertation. I am truly thankful for her time and involvement. I must also thank my outside reader, Paula Fass, whose pioneering work in the history of childhood has made this project possible. I am grateful for her encouragement, organization, and willingness to entertain a very different disciplinary perspective from her own. Many faculty members beyond my official dissertation committee have been supportive of me and influential for this project; I am particularly grateful to Susan Schweik, who directed an independent study on children’s literature that first sparked my interest in The Water-Babies, and who served as an examiner on my qualifying exam committee and as my second reader at an earlier stage of the project. I must also acknowledge Dan Blanton, Steve Goldsmith, and Kent Puckett for many enlightening conversations on nineteenth-century literature, Elizabeth Abel for facilitating an excellent prospectus workshop and encouraging me at critical moments in my graduate career, Oliver Arnold for helping me learn how to talk about my project, and Victoria Frede for serving on my prospectus committee. Kathleen Donegan, Nadia Ellis, and Eric Falci provided me with excellent mentorship in my final year of graduate school and were willing to share the intimate details of their own writing processes. Elisa Tamarkin encouraged me in what seemed my darkest hour and smoothed my path to completion. I am thankful for the support and feedback of my graduate colleagues Ruth Baldwin, Ben Cannon, Dan Clinton, Marisa Knox, Gina Patnaik, and Monica Soare, who have helped me slowly tease out my ideas over many years of conversation and writing. Several discussion groups contributed to my thinking, including the Nineteenth Century and Beyond British Cultural Studies Working Group, the Children’s Literature Working Group, and the “Victorian Supper Club.” Among the many people who made these discussions stimulating and enlightening, I must especially thank Mark Allison and Rae Greiner, who encouraged me during the early years of my graduate career; Natalia Cecire, Arcadia Falcone, and Andrea Lankin, whose interest in critical approaches to children’s literature strongly influenced my reading of the child fantasy novel; and Charity Ketz and Ian Thomas-Bignami, who read and commented on an early draft of my first chapter. In the final months of writing, I received invaluable support both intellectual and practical from Rebecca Munson and Claude Willan. I would also like to acknowledge the generous financial support of the Berkeley English Department, the Center for British Studies, and the Berkeley Graduate Division. Finally, I must thank my husband, Jonathan Browning, whose faith and love sustained me through eight years of graduate school. iii Chapter 1 Imaginary Pupils: Educational Philosophy in Romantic Fiction Je ne sais comment j’appris à lire; je ne me souviens que de mes premières lectures et de leur effet sur moi: c’est le temps d’où je date sans interruption la conscience de moi-même. – Rousseau, Confessions Introduction Studies of children in literature tend to identify a moment of origin at which childhood begins to interest authors, and children begin to interest publishers – a moment before which children’s voices are rarely represented, and after which child readers and characters appear everywhere. This obsession with the genesis of literary childhood derives largely from Phillipe Ariès’s groundbreaking L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (1960),1 which argues that modern childhood came into existence in the late seventeenth century and that Western artistic and cultural representations of childhood as we now define it hardly existed before that time. In recent decades, scholars have responded to Ariès’s controversial thesis by identifying manifestations of modern childhood in earlier periods, particularly in the Middle Ages and