Capturing (and Captivating) Childhood: The Role of Illustrations in Eighteenth‐Century Children's Books in Britain and France
2008; Wiley; Volume: 31; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1754-0208.2008.00115.x
ISSN1754-0208
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Literary Analyses
ResumoJust as views on childhood and the upbringing of children in the eighteenth century were affected by social and economic factors, so the development of the children's book trade in Britain and France was influenced by evolving views on the family and social class, the place of religion in daily life, the interest in science, the rise of consumerism, the growth in literacy and, perhaps most importantly, the debate about education. During the century, the special nature of children was increasingly recognised and the young were seen as vulnerable creatures to be safeguarded and moulded, a view that brought with it an increased emphasis amongst theorists on parental accountability.1 It is well established that John Locke's writings on education exerted a considerable and lasting influence on both pedagogical theory and the ways in which the role of books for children was perceived.2 His argument in Some Thoughts on Education (1693) that education shaped the moral and economic man and that children's minds were a tabula rasa on which sound values, morals and habits had to be imprinted and an ‘empty cabinet’ to be filled with knowledge firmly established an acceptance of the crucial formative influence of education from an early age.3 With the general expansion of the book trade, reading material for the young that provided this service was increasingly seen as a socially useful and lucrative gap in the market to be filled. In an age when class boundaries were gradually becoming more flexible (more so in Britain than in France) and economic success through one's own efforts was seen as an attainable goal, children's books, like education, were marketed as an investment for the future for both the individual and the nation.4 From the mid-eighteenth century, when the publication of books explicitly targeting young readers began to take off, the vast majority of both school and leisure reading was underpinned by an overt pedagogical agenda that aimed to socialise the young and inculcate the religious beliefs and social and moral values of the prevailing dominant culture. Books were, in effect, now regarded as tools for the social, moral and political conditioning of the young.5 Wolfgang Iser's concept of the ‘implied reader’, a reader constructed by a text who ‘embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect’, is a particularly interesting one in respect of early children's books.6 Writers assumed, or sought to construct in their content and mode of address, a reader who either already shared, or who would respond in the desired manner to, the social and cultural values inscribed in the text. In his influential article, ‘The Reader in the Book’ in Signal (1980), Aidan Chambers describes the various strategies (such as tone, point of view, placing a child at the centre of the text) used by the successful author of children's books to ‘stage-manage the reader's involvement’ in the narrative.7 Even in the eighteenth century, such narrative strategies as direct exhortation, implied collusion and the assumption of shared values were already being deployed to this effect. As cultural constructions of childhood and views on the upbringing and education of children evolved in Britain and France under the influence of the thoughts of Locke, and François Fénelon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France, so did the recognition that instruction was more potent if allied to a degree of entertainment. The history of the development of children's literature through the eighteenth century and beyond is, in effect, linked to the shifting balance between these twin imperatives of instruction and amusement, although views differed widely on what should constitute the latter. One significant development was the inclusion of visual stimuli in the form of illustrations. The increasing number of images in children's books in the latter half of the century played an important part in the communication of meaning and the construction of the implied reader, as well as in making reading matter more enticing and available to less competent readers. John Locke emphasises, in Some Thoughts on Education, the importance of the senses and observation in storing the empty cabinet of the mind, and recommends the use of images in helping children to become acquainted with the world. Speaking of Aesop's Fables, he recommends: If his Aesop has pictures in it, it will entertain him much the better, and encourage him to read, when it carries the increase of knowledge with it. For such visible objects children hear talked of in vain, and without any satisfaction, whilst they have no ideas of them: those ideas being not to be had from the sounds; but from the things themselves, or their pictures.8 His contemporary, Fénelon, in his Traité de l’éducation des filles (1689), also argued the case for making instruction pleasurable and recommended encouraging children to look at engravings and paintings because ‘tout ce qui réjouit l’imagination facilite l’étude’ (‘everything which delights the imagination makes study easier’).9 The same pedagogical ethos had informed Jan Amos Comenius's Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658), originally published in Latin and German and widely used in translation throughout Europe. This work, which is often seen as the forerunner of illustrated books for children, made language and knowledge accessible to the young via the juxtaposition of word and image so that the word and the object designated would be learnt together. The preface speaks of enticing children through pictures to imbibe knowledge about the world through interest and entertainment, and the many topics covered include scenes of daily and family life, school and games as well as cities, food, animals, the land, the sea and the heavens. The content of the Orbis sensualium pictus remained largely unchanged up to the end of the eighteenth century and served as a model for later encyclopedias and textbooks. Early alphabet books had also exploited the possibility of images as a visual stimulus to learning and, of course, young readers had long had access to cheap chapbooks (in France the Bibliothèque bleue) which included rough woodcuts in their presentation of legends, fairy tales and practical knowledge.10 The eighteenth century, with its passion for the mediation of knowledge about the world rather then purely spiritual instruction, saw a proliferation of works on history, geography and the natural sciences that were profusely illustrated with woodcuts of historical figures, places, animals and natural wonders for readers of all ages. Two widely read and influential French texts that enjoyed numerous editions, adaptations and translations throughout the eighteenth century were Buffon's Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749-1789) and Pluche's Le Spectacle de la nature, ou Entretiens sur les particularités de l’histoire naturelle qui ont paru les plus propres à rendre les jeunes gens curieux et à leur former l’esprit (1732-1750). The former, in particular, remained a best-seller into the nineteenth century and later abécédaires frequently drew on Buffon's detailed images of animals. The combination of text and image was, of course, also exploited in France in the Encyclopédie, of which extracts and adaptations were produced for young readers, including works focusing on arts et métiers to introduce them to agricultural and industrial activities and products. In Britain, Thomas Boreman's Description of Three Hundred Animals; viz Beasts, Birds, Fishes, Serpents and Insects (1730), a compilation of images of creatures real and mythological, aimed explicitly, with its many copperplate illustrations, to ‘lure children to read’; A General History of Quadrupeds produced in 1790 by the celebrated illustrator Thomas Bewick, targeted a dual readership with over two hundred wood engravings and numerous title vignettes and tailpieces that have been described as ‘wonders of observation’.11 In her Adèle et Théodore, ou Lettres sur l’éducation (1782), translated into English by Thomas Holcroft in 1783, Mme de Genlis, pedagogue and author of many works for both children and adults, described her method of routinely exposing children to information by decorating the house with pictures of biblical and mythical scenes, classical history, historical personages, and maps. This strategy not only appealed to Richard and Maria Edgeworth who recommended it in their Practical Education (1798) but also inspired Sarah Trimmer's series of prints accompanying lessons on the New Testament, ancient and English history.12 Although not actually referring to images, Locke's recommendation in the context of warning children against vice, that ‘the showing him the world, as it really is, before he comes wholly into it, is one of the best means, I think, to prevent this mischief’, can be seen as equally applicable to subsequent writers’ approach to both text and image in books that sought to teach morals and manners rather than just to impart information.13 Books which aimed to teach young readers how to see themselves in relation to the world around them, and how to interact with other people in their society, proliferated in the second half of the century. John Trusler's The Progress of Man and Society (1791) was influenced by Comenius; it aimed at ‘opening the eyes and unfolding the minds of youth gradually’ and spoke of using pictures ‘to cheat them into thought by amusement’. It was described as ‘an encyclopaedia of manners’ and, in its large number of illustrations by John Bewick, portrayed adult and child figures indulging in various work and leisure activities.14 Locke's recommendation is exemplified in a decorous manner in the first of William Blake's illustrations for the 1791 edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories (1788), which recounts the upbringing of two young girls in the home of a strictly rational governess who cures them of their faults and teaches them reason and virtue. In the frontispiece, the governess, Mrs Mason, her arms outstretched, presents to the reader's scrutiny two immaculately attired and virtually identical young girls, their hats like halos around their heads, who gaze admiringly up at her. Although the caption reads ‘Look, girls, what a fine morning it is. Insects, birds and animals are all enjoying existence’, the impression is rather that she is presenting the girls to the world, rather than the other way around (Fig. 1). Indeed, her charges, Mary and Caroline, do represent role models for the reader in a text in which ‘conversations and tales are accommodated to the present state of society’ and which portrays and castigates folly and unsocialised behaviour.15 Mary Wollstonecraft, Original Stories Locke insists upon the power of example in instructing children: ‘But of all the ways whereby Children are to be instructed, and their Manners formed, the plainest, easiest and most efficacious is, to set before their Eyes the examples of those Things you would have them do, or avoid’.16 Although he disagreed with Locke over the role of reason in the early upbringing of a child and advocating rather a ‘natural’ education based on learning through experience, Rousseau, in Emile, ou de l’éducation (1762), concurred warmly with this recommendation: ‘L’Exemple! L’exemple! Sans cela on ne réussit rien auprès des enfants’ (‘Examples! examples! Without them you can't succeed in doing anything with children’).17 The emphasis on the socialisation of the young in a secular sense in works of fiction such as moral and cautionary tales increasingly incorporated images to support and exemplify the examples portrayed in the text. For the very young, images are arguably more potent than words, and there was an increasing recognition in the eighteenth century that inexperienced and impressionable readers were more likely to be moved and influenced by images than by words alone. Illustrations, especially those featuring a child figure, aimed not only to furnish the ‘empty cabinets’ of the young readers’ minds, but to encourage an appropriate construction of the self while they assisted in the process of reading and following a narrative. The reader's attention is often explicitly drawn to an illustration, and she or he is encouraged to observe and assess its content and consider its application to their own behaviour or way of life.18 It is clear that the implied reader is one who will react as the narrator suggests and draw the desired conclusions from what they see. Whether in the form of crude woodcuts in the first half of the century or of more sophisticated engravings on wood, copper or steel in the last years of the 1700s, illustrations were employed to exemplify good and bad role models and the consequences of desirable or undesirable behaviour, according to contemporary standards, and were invested with considerable persuasive power. They reflected the world in which the actual readers lived and in which they were expected to learn to make their way and achieve success and happiness through the internalisation of contemporary ideologies. They also offered vicarious and hence safe access to different kinds of social condition and experience. As such, they potentially offer the reader today considerable insight into the way of life in eighteenth-century society in the countries of origin. In his book Fictional France. Social Reality in the French Novel 1775-1800 (1993), Malcolm Cook argues, in respect of a fictional text, that a moral is more effective if the illusion of reality is a convincing one.19 How, then, and to what extent do illustrations support the illusion of authenticity? Just as a fictional text manipulates reality to ‘produce a set of circumstances that reality seldom produces’ (for example, a happy ending in which all dilemmas are resolved), so illustrations in children's books tend to mediate a clear and simplified image of reality.20 They depict, in effect, a re-imagined reality which is profoundly informed by the ideological agenda of the accompanying text. This is most noticeable, for example, in the portrayal of the family and the widespread modifying and even at times romanticising of poverty and hardship, a topic that nonetheless plays an important role in eighteenth-century children's books. This paper will now examine some of the specific ways in which illustrations functioned in books for young readers in Britain and France in the eighteenth century and how they represented the society of the times. Reference will be made to a range of texts, from the rough woodcuts of John Newbery's publications, like his Little Pretty Pocketbook of 1744, to the more sophisticated engraved images of John Bewick for The Looking-Glass for the Mind (1792), an adaptation of Arnaud Berquin's L’Ami des enfans of 1782-1783. The discussion will also include less well known texts that targeted children of both sexes and consider, amongst other aspects, the construction of gender and evolving concepts of personal and civic virtue to show how images were deployed not so much to portray childhood and the world as they were in reality, but to capture the impressionable child reader within a predetermined nexus of social and moral values while, at the same time, making the book itself and the values it mediated attractive and desirable to the young. The audience for children's books for leisure reading in both Britain and France in the middle of the eighteenth century came largely from the middle and upper classes of society, who were economically privileged enough to be able to afford books and to have the education to learn to read them. Because of the sporadic and uneven nature of the provision of education in both countries, levels of literacy and opportunities for access to reading materials amongst the working classes and the peasantry varied enormously. The majority of early children's books reflect the likely dominant readership in the situations narrated, so that their mode of address in the text and accompanying illustrations depict, for the most part, the private sphere of comfortable bourgeois domestic life, particularly in books for the very young. The often slender plots evolve in the social spaces of eighteenth-century childhood, the home, the garden and occasionally the school, and focus on the dilemmas of interaction within a family context. The portrayal of the family faithfully reflects the social, religious and cultural norms informing a patriarchal society's views on the relationship between parents and children; they offer an idealised image of stability, unity and harmony, one exemplified and endorsed by the illustrations. Children are frequently portrayed kneeling before a parent or standing at the parental knee receiving a blessing. Obedience to adult authority is promoted as an essential grounding for happiness and success in later life, and discipline and the correction of vice is a common theme. The presence in the illustrations of an adult figure, whether parent, tutor or servant, reminds the young reader of their relative position in the power structure of the household and the social hierarchy. In order to make their works interesting and attractive to the young, and hence more effective as vehicles for morals and manners, writers attempted to enter the child's world by depicting typical childhood activities. These are often strictly gendered: girls are depicted in sedentary activities such as reading and sewing with their mother or another female authority figure, while boys are shown engaging in more energetic activities in the open air, such as running and kite-flying. Such images thus offer useful information about the way in which childhood was perceived and, more importantly, desired to be. The sanitised and ideal world portrayed is one to which, it is implied, the reader can easily aspire, and it is the task of the writer to persuade the reader that this world can also be found in reality if they willingly collude with the moral values embedded in the text.21 In Britain, John Newbery was the first to exploit the potential of the market for children's books, and aimed his publications at the growing middle classes. His best-known publication, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), a miscellany for both boys and girls, was one of the earliest texts to exploit text and image to instruct child readers while entertaining them with a variety of material and a plethora of illustrations. A brief introductory essay addressed to parents outlines a theory of upbringing overtly indebted to ‘the great Mr Locke’ and advises that the key to happiness is to ‘subdue therefore your Children's Passions; curb their Tempers, and make them subservient to the Rules of Reason’.22 An alphabet of children's games and a set of proverbs are accompanied by small woodcuts, which, although crudely drawn, and lacking either nuance, detail or complexity, nevertheless focus firmly on children's experience and activities. The frontispiece of the book clearly demonstrates the target audience: an elegantly dressed lady with a book in one hand sits before an imposing and ornate fireplace with two equally elegantly attired young children standing before her (Fig. 2). This composition recalls the frontispiece to Charles Perrault's Contes, ou Histoires du temps passé (1697), published in English with the same illustrations in 1729, in which a group of children surround a seated figure of an elderly woman (la mère l’Oye, or Mother Goose) who appears, by the position of her raised hand, to be recounting a tale. But whereas the setting of Perrault's text is a modest cottage, Newbery's setting indicates the high social standing of the figures, reflecting the likely readership of the work, and thereby aiding the young reader's identification with Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly for whom, the subtitle indicates, the text is intended. Such a composition is found repeatedly in frontispieces to children's books throughout the eighteenth century and beyond, and promotes the increasing contemporary emphasis on the importance of family and, for the adult purchasers of such books, on the role of parents in educating the young. The activity of reading together is associated with an attractive ideal of family harmony and mutual benefit and delight but also indicates the belief held by many writers that children's reading should be carefully monitored and glossed by an adult co-reader. John Newbery, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book Newbery's optimistic belief in a meritocracy led him to show the world as full of opportunities for self-betterment and advancement, and the emphasis in all his books for children is on the importance of virtue, hard work and education.23 The letters purporting to be from Jack the Giant Killer to Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly, who are explicitly compared with the reader, promote the notion of the acquisition of worldly goods through virtue. The text tells how a young boy and girl who were attentive to their studies, dutiful to their parents and obliging to all, achieved general esteem and social success. The boy's behaviour and learning ‘raise him from a mean state of life to a coach and six, in which he rides to this day’, while the girl also ‘works well with her needle, and is so modest, so willing to do as she is bid, and so engaging in company’ that a wealthy patron presents her with a gold watch.24 The accompanying images show a young man seated in a moving coach and a young woman standing in an elegantly furnished room displaying her watch, thus foregrounding for the reader the results and rewards of good behaviour and emphasising the gender-specific aspect of contemporary assumptions about the nature of social success and personal happiness. A group of four images that follow the letters illustrate models of behaviour: two children are shown kneeling in prayer bathed in the light from large windows; kneeling again to receive the blessing of their finely dressed parents; reading at a table in a well-stocked library (Fig. 3); and finally, bestowing charity at their door to a passing family with a dog. John Newbery, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book Although the illustrations are stiff and primitive, they powerfully communicate the moral in the text: that cultivating the habit of good behaviour at home, obedience to parental authority and charitableness will earn the love and admiration of all, beginning within the family and extending to everybody they meet. The prescription of such virtues came to dominate in children's literature for a century and more and present an idealistic view of how a child can influence not only her or his own future, but the well-being of society as a whole. The Little Pretty Pocket-Book also reveals its debt to illustrated alphabet books in its section in which letters of the alphabet are accompanied by illustrations of children's games juxtaposed with moral reflections and proverbs. This is clearly an attempt to encourage the association of learning with fun and suggests a link between the rules of games and the rules of life. The images display a common division in children's books, mainly depicting boys indulging in sports and activities outdoors (playing with balls, quoits or on stilts, flying kites, playing leapfrog, dancing around a maypole) while girls are only portrayed twice, dancing and playing a version of blind-man's buff in a domestic interior. The images are lively and portray the children engaging in these activities without an intrusive adult presence, although the formal attire of the boys, who are wearing frock coats and tricorne hats in even the most energetic of activities, suggests that decorum is necessary even in play. There were many children's books in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century that sought to promote virtuous behaviour through incorporating moral lessons into a full-length narrative with more individualised characters and entertaining episodes to capture the young reader's interest and stimulate the capacity for reflection and self-examination. They reflect the increased emphasis on appearance and behaviour in the definition of gentility that was characteristic of the wealthy middle classes.25 Samuel J. Pickering argues in John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-Century England that such books became more serious towards the end of the century, emphasising constraints and ‘confining the imagination within a hedge of responsibilities’.26 This view is endorsed by Mary V. Jackson in Engines of Instruction, Mischief and Magic, and she argues moreover that in later eighteenth-century books, there is an increasing gender divide in that girls’ activities are portrayed as more limited and their activities more passive and sedentary.27 In Britain and in France, large numbers of books specifically targeting girls were published in the last third of the century and many reflect contemporary views on femininity and the education of girls which were derived from Rousseau's Emile ou de l’éducation. Rousseau introduces Sophie as a contrast to Emile and proposes a form of education based on an assumption of intellectual inferiority and a notion of the role of women as guardians of morality as wives and mothers within a domestic environment. Despite Rousseau's well-known opinion on encouraging children to read, his pedagogical theories were immensely influential on children's books in Britain as in France. Narratives of family life thus reflected gender stereotyping already becoming firmly embedded in the theory and practice of girls’ education, and in turn promoted to young female readers a creation of the self informed by a model of femininity based on essentially artificial constructs.28 Among the most entertaining of such full-length moral tales were the works of Dorothy and Mary Ann Kilner, published by John Marshall, a leading publisher of children's books, which were concerned with everyday conduct and therefore portrayed desirable and undesirable role models within a realistic and largely domestic environment. In Mary Ann Kilner's Jemima Placid; or, the Advantage of Good Nature Exemplified in a Variety of Familiar Incidents (circa 1783), the slim plot involving a six-year-old girl's sojourn with her quarrelsome and ill-mannered cousins in London portrays a series of lively episodes in which Jemima is a witness, and occasional victim, of other children's misbehaviour. This strategy, reflected in the illustrations, positions the reader in such a way that Jemima's observations and reactions will encourage her or him to react in the desired manner. The episodes depicted are, moreover, of a kind that any young reader would easily have been able to identify with. The agenda of exemplification is followed through in the simple woodcuts which are placed within the text and for the most part depict Jemima watching squabbles between her cousins Miss Sally and Miss Nelly or the unfortunate consequences of an incident.29 The backgrounds in the images show plain panelled walls with minimal items of furniture (a pedestal table, an ornate mirror), and the dress of the characters is simple but stylish enough to indicate a prosperous family setting. The physical context is thus simple and uncluttered which, although probably corresponding to practical and economic necessities in the creation of the images, insinuates that this is how the moral should be seen. Although still unsophisticated and rather stiff and formal, the images focus on action and a key moment in the episode, leaving no room for ambiguity: the unseemly violence of the cousins’ struggle to get the best position on the window-seat is shown to result in an overturned table which scatters their sewing tools and Jemima's doll on the floor (Fig. 4). Mary Ann Kilner, Jemima Placid or, the Advantage of Good Nature In another, one sister seeks to snatch a plaything from the other's hands while their maid is trying to pack their belongings in a trunk. A prank in which a visitor's snuffbox is filled with pepper is depicted in such a way as to generate suspense and amusement: the man has his hand raised to his nose, while two young men stand by, their heads together in a complicitous pose. An interpolated tale which recounts how a father jabs the hands of both his son and his daughter with a spur to teach them table manners is illustrated with an image of the three sitting primly at their meal, the father, weapon in hand, closely scrutinising his son, who sits with his elbows on the table. The focus of the images is thus predominantly on the negative example. At the end of the book, Kilner addresses the reader directly, emphasising the didactic agenda and her belief in the power of example: The only use of reading is to acquire instruction; and if you seek not to resemble the good, and avoid the bad examples with which you are presented, your studies will tend to little purpose. If the characters you meet with in any degree resemble your own, and if the foibles of those characters disgust and offend you, instead of throwing the book aside with resentment, you should endeavour to improve the failings of which you are conscious, and then you will no longer meet your own portrait, in that which the Author has described.30 While the focus in the illustrations to Jemima Placid is more on the child characters, in Dorothy Kilner's The Holyday Present, containing Anecdotes of Mr and Mrs Jennet and their Little Family (circa 1781), the role of parents as dispensers of discipline is more overt, the text thus serving as an example to parents as well as to their offspring. The father purchases two boxes filled with various rewards or punishments: books, balls, doll in ‘the good child's box’ and a dunce's cap, rods and medallions with inscriptions in ‘the naughty child's box’ and they are distributed as appropriate. Th
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