Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster, editors
THE CHILD WRITER FROM AUSTEN TO WOOLF
312pp. Cambridge University Press. £50.
0 521 81293 3
Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell with Thoby Stephen
HYDE PARK GATE NEWS
The Stephen Family Newspaper
Edited by Gill Lowe,
240pp. Hesperus Press. £14.99.
1 84391 701 7
The term “children’s literature” refers to what is written for the young, not by them. Teachers assess pupils’ work, parents rejoice in the talents of their offspring, and scholars examine the first ventures of those who go on to fame, but nobody else pays much attention to child writers. If this habit is beginning to change, the new prestige of literature for children has prepared the ground. Children have attracted serious notice as readers in recent years, and seeing them as potential producers, not just consumers, is an expansion of this interest.
Like other dependent groups, they invite the scrutiny of scholars who are trained to read history from its sidelines. The shifting profile of the academic profession has also helped. Women are increasingly dominant within the practice of literary scholarship and criticism, and they often have first-hand experience of children’s creativity. The quiet work of the Juvenilia Press, established in 1994, supports this movement. Christine Alexander, General Editor of that Press, has now joined with Juliet McMaster, its founder, to compile The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, a solid volume of essays on nineteenth-century children’s writing. Their declared aim is to encourage the recognition of “the child’s own authentic voice and authority, and to explore a category of literature that has been largely neglected”. Deceptively modest in tone, it is in fact a determinedly ambitious book. The larger intention is nothing less than the definition of a new genre within the literary academy, with a theoretical framework and distinctive identity, which claims consideration and respect.
This is a generous mission, but it is fraught with difficulties of a kind that are intermittently identified by contributors, without being conclusively addressed. Children do not constitute a stable and self-contained community. When do they cease to be children, and how far can their work be defined as entirely their own? In this volume, juvenilia is defined as writing completed before the age of twenty, but the inclusion of writing from the later teenage years complicates the consideration of what might be described as a tradition of children’s writing. A nineteen-year-old is not a child, though independence might be some way off. At any point in their development, young people cannot escape the interference of grown-ups, nor manage without their backing. Sometimes adults exercise control directly, as they edit, manipulate and censor a child’s writing. More often, their presence is felt as the source of validating approval, or the means by which writing could be allowed at all.
Before the arrival of universal education, affluence was essential, for leisure, literacy and writing materials were scarcely available without money. When poor children did attempt to secure a precocious status or income through their writing, the way was hard. Thomas Chatterton, who killed himself in 1770 at the age of eighteen, strove to launch his career through a sustained campaign of imitation that finally touched an extraordinary level of originality. Poverty and isolation defeated him. Had his luck been better, he would have been admired for his imaginative energies; for the publication of juvenilia was fashionable in the late eighteenth century, and many major Romantic texts were produced by teenagers on the edge of self-sufficiency. Blake’s brilliance was evident by the age of fourteen. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as an eighteen-year-old, and Keats had achieved a good deal at that age. The poems in Byron’s first published collection were written between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. Subversive adolescent writing could find a welcome, because it was a time when boldness was thought to be desirable. If rebellion is expected and generally admired in a writer, literature can be both fiery and conformist. This made it especially attractive to girls. It was easier for a young woman to be a revolutionary on the page than in the nursery or schoolroom, and many of the richest examples singled out for discussion in this volume were written by spirited girls. Romanticism and its legacies in Victorian
culture created a confident body of youthful writing. The choice of the nineteenth century as the period in which to showcase the child writer must have been an easy one.
We can learn about what mattered most in middle-class literary culture of the period by identifying what children cared to reproduce. Identifying the earliest models of those who later achieved their own significance is particularly enlightening, and such research has always dominated the field. Despite their emphasis on the value of all children’s writing, contributors to this volume continue to concentrate on the initial work of canonical authors. Alexander is a Brontë scholar, and McMaster is an authority on Jane Austen. Those authors, together with Byron, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Ruskin, Mary Ward, Amy Levy and Virginia Woolf, make up the bulk of the book’s material. One striking
point, emerging repeatedly in these essays, is the extent to which Walter Scott laid the foundations for the tastes of a generation. His varied offerings of adventure, vivid romance and lyrical poetry were enthusiastically read and imitated by children from the age of eight. Other sources were less literary. Children would model their work on contemporary newspapers and magazines, mingling fiction, poetry and vivid reportage, imitating the layout of favourite publications. Some of the liveliest material in The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf investigates the production of family journals, where many children developed an appetite for literary success. These were necessarily short-lived, and most have vanished. Where examples of this exuberant and often illuminating subgenre have survived, it is usually because at least one of their contributors achieved adult eminence. A famous example, The Hyde Park Gate News, was the work of various young Stephens, the children of Leslie and Julia Stephen. Written in the 1890s, it was in due course bound in “cornflower-blue leather” and safely tucked away in the British Library. Always endearingly aware of its own consequence, it has now achieved the adult dignity of publication, meticulously edited by Gill Lowe and gracefully presented. But like much writing by children, its first purpose was to please parents. Later, Vanessa remembered how eager Virginia was for “the good opinion of the grown-ups”, and recalls hiding to watch Julia’s reaction to an issue left for her inspection: “‘Rather clever, I think,’ said my mother, putting the paper down without apparent excitement”. This cool response was enough for Virginia: “she had had approval and been called clever, and our eavesdropping was rewarded”. As Hermione Lee remarks in her introduction to this edition in book form, much of the interest of the journal lies in the identifiable origins of Virginia Woolf’s sharp-eyed perceptions. An early ruthlessness is apparent. The serial “Experiences of a Pater-Familias” could not be further from Victorian sentimentality: “My wife a month ago got a child and I regret to say that I wish he had never been born for I am made to give in to him in everything”. Playful dissections of pomposity coexist oddly with an eager vulnerability as the journal develops. The final, melancholy entry, made just weeks before childhood abruptly ended with the death of Julia Stephen in 1895, when Virginia was thirteen, is already beginning to acknowledge the demands and rewards of authorship as a profession rather than a pastime. The Editor explains the “system of poetry” to her faltering Author:
“All these things are a matter of practice. I had a friend who could not write a line to save her life. I offered her a shilling a stanza – behold 20 stanzas ready in an hour’s time! Marvellous! Quite passable lines too – she had a rhyming dictionary, a very useful thing, my dear.” I believe that the Author produced some hundred verses with the help of the rhyming dictionary. We have decided not to reproduce them here.
Other literary eminences have comparable origins. The extraordinary literary energies of the Benson family first took shape in a family magazine, while Amy Levy learned to write among the cheerful “Harum-Scarum Band of Scribblers”. Lewis Carroll was a schoolboy
journalist, and his contributions to a series of home productions reveal how quickly his characteristic voice emerged, and how much its violence owes to the frustrations of family politics:
“Sister, sister, go to bed,
Go and rest your weary head”,
Thus the prudent brother said.
“Do you want a battered hide
Or scratches to your face applied?”
Thus the sister calm replied.
The Brontës’ more elaborate and ambitious imitation of Blackwood’s, edited by Branwell as Branwell’s Blackwood’s Magazine, initiated their dizzyingly complex childhood writing. Much the most carefully studied oeuvre by children in existence, this labyrinth of invention is inextricably associated with the siblings’ mature accomplishment. Branwell, who had seemed the family’s most capable member, could not escape the entanglements of the fictional world he had created as a boy, and his work is still constrained by its history, on
his death at the age of thirty-one. Victor A. Neufeldt’s essay on Branwell’s unhappy and finally futile struggles to establish an adult identity makes saddening reading. In general, however, the essays bear witness to the high-
spirited pleasure that writing provided in the lives of these aspiring authors. David Hanson argues that Ruskin’s Evangelical mother attempted to curtail the abundant productivity of her son, but her religious anxieties were clearly tempered by irrepressible pride in John’s talents, and served only to strengthen his commitment to a life in writing. Though Elizabeth Barrett’s literary tastes tended towards the lugubrious, they are expressed with a gloomy relish that must have been a satisfaction to their author:
A wretched Mother, fondly pressed,
Her infant Babies to her breast;
These were stern winters lonely prize,
They shut – they closed poor little eyes.
They died, contented in their Mothers arms
No houses near – nor little farms!
Beverly Taylor argues that Elizabeth, eight years old when she wrote that, was responding to the death of her younger sister Mary at three and a half. This is persuasive, though the melodramatic setting seems to owe much to Wordsworth’s pitiful images of abandoned mothers. This combination of the personal and the derivative sheds light on the strand of mournfulness in Barrett’s mature work, which deepened when Bro, her eldest brother, drowned when she was in her thirties. Broken family circles leave their mark on many child writers.
No such shadows fall on the early work of Jane Austen, whose wickedly sharp stories written between the ages of twelve and seventeen are among the most remarkable and certainly the most enjoyable examples of child writing in print. As Margaret Anne Doody points out, the young novelist both exploits and ridicules narrative conventions with astonishing self-assurance. In Volume the First, Frederic and Elfrida, she satirizes the notion of lovers as kindred spirits:
“They were exceedingly handsome and so much alike, that it was not every one who knew them apart. Nay even their most intimate friends had nothing to distinguish them by, but the shape of the face, the colour of the Eye, the length of the Nose and the difference of the complexion.”
The demands of the market meant that Austen had to redefine herself within the moral traditions of the courtship novel, as it was developing in the early nineteenth century, before she could publish her work. But traces of the girl’s defiance remain. Moral or not, she is surprisingly reluctant to punish badly-
behaved characters. Lucy Steele, Wickham, the Crawfords, Lydia Bennet and William Elliot are never brought to ruin. In one of the most perceptive essays in Alexander and McMaster’s collection, Rachel M. Brownstein shows that Austen’s childlike spirit of mockery has more in common with Byron’s scorn of “flimsy romance” than might be supposed. Both see through the conventions they draw on.
Images of childhood changed towards the end of the nineteenth century, and what was most prized in children’s writing changed with them. Shrewd or learned children were no longer wanted. Instead, girls and boys were required to demonstrate their separation from worldly experience. Economic changes lay behind this shift in sensibility. As children were withdrawn from the labour force into compulsory education, there was a movement to detach them from maturity, extending the reach of an attractively helpless infantilism. A kind of cute comedy or wistful feyness, alien to the merciless irreverence of earlier generations, became popular. The youthful Jane Austen is entirely in control of her material, and knows why it will make her readers laugh. Daisy Ashford’s hugely successful novel The Young Visiters, supposedly written in 1889 when she was eight, and published in 1919, depends for its appeal on Daisy’s apparently naive unawareness of what the reader will make of this childish story. “Then he sat down and eat the egg which Ethel had so kindly laid for him.” If
this is funny, the joke is an adult one. Juliet McMaster claims that contemporary scepticism about the credentials of The Young Visiters was based on the conviction “that no child so young could know so much”. But it is the slyly constructed ignorance of the writing, calculated to appeal to the knowingness of its amused readers, that makes it hard to believe that the book was composed without adult intervention. The celebrated diary of Opal Whiteley, said to have been written by an ill-used Oregon farm girl at the age of six or seven in 1904–5, is still more suspect. Opal is in the habit of communicating with nature:
“Earth-voices are glad voices, and earth-songs come up from the ground through the plants; and in their flowering and in the days before these days are come, they do tell the earth-songs to the wind. And the wind in her goings does whisper them to folks to print for other folks. So other folks do have knowing of earth’s songs. When I grow up I am going to write for children – and grown-ups that haven’t grown up too much – all the earth-songs I now do hear”.
We are not given detailed evidence for the authenticity of this diary, purportedly reconstructed from fragments in 1919, the year in which the manuscript of The Young Visiters is said to have been discovered lying in a drawer. The proof would have to be very convincing to persuade me that a child of around seven, with access to nothing more than the scantiest education, was responsible for that passage. If we are to do justice to the resourcefulness of child writers, we need a measure of their brisk scepticism.
