Little Pilgrims' Progress: literary horizons for children's literature.(Woman's Building Library at the Chicago World's Fair)

The Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition highlighted works by women authors, many of whom wrote for or about children, in the decade before children's literature was institutionalized by publishers and librarians. This noncanonical, eclectic assortment of children's literature exists within an interpretive framework--the horizons of expectations--by which children's books were received by late Victorian America. Drawing on reception theory, I construct the cultural climate of reception by which the art and commerce of children's books were idealized and realized. The books on the shelves of the Woman's Building Library function as mirror and lamp, reflecting American culture but also constructing that culture, a pilgrimage into literary romanticism and the cultural work of Victorian women writers in their "sensational designs" to move human hearts and change the world.

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    Our burdens are here, our road  is before us, and the longing for    goodness and happiness is the guide  that leads us through many    troubles and mistakes to the peace which  is a true Celestial City.    Now, my little pilgrims, suppose you begin  again, not in play, but in    earnest, and see how far on you get before  father comes home.    --Louisa May Alcott, Little Women 

"I do wish there was a city beautiful." So sighs Meg Macleod after reading John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come (1678) and imagining herself at the gates of the Celestial City. Her brother Robin interrupts the reverie by assuring her that just such a place exists "and not a hundred miles away," (1) and off these two orphans go in search of the Chicago World's Fair in Frances Hodgson Burnett's tale Two Little Pilgrims' Progress (1895): "Bunyan's City Beautiful made real in the White City by the Lake." (2)

Burnett's story of the children's journey encodes the Horatio Alger myth of sensational fiction as well as the allegorical character Christian of devotional fiction, creating a conflicted landscape of the faithful and the fantastic, a secular paradise, much like the fair itself. Crowds of visitors believed they were witnessing the glorious culmination of events that the coming of Columbus had begun four hundred years before. Designers made the White City a visual statement of peace, progress, and prosperity, a Utopia with messianic possibilities. Seven years later the great American fairy tale--The Wizard of Oz (1900)--would embellish the myth in its own Utopia, the Emerald City of Oz, a city as glowing and colorful as a green jewel. Like Burnett, L. Frank Baum was fascinated by the glitz and scale of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, which showcased marvels of technology framed in the neoclassical temples of a spectacular White City. In making the vision of the City Beautiful his own, Baum created a world just beyond the yellow brick road, a pilgrimage away.

My aim is to become a pilgrim of sorts, to journey back to the America of the 1880s and 1890s, the end of the Gilded Age, the fin de siecle. My destination is the Chicago World's Fair, a razzle-dazzle drama of American cultural history where visitors flocked to see spectacles of light, a brilliant White City by a lake. I go not as a spectator but as a reader. Viewing the World's Fair as a social text, involving complex relationships among planners, publishers, writers, and readers, young and old, I want to visit this site of struggle: a site grounded in its historical circumstances and ideological purposes. My journey's end is the Woman's Building Library, in which children's books were featured in the display honoring women writers. With my particular interest in the Victorian reception of children's books, I wondered how this eclectic assortment of texts might fit (or not) within an interpretive framework--the horizons of expectations--by which I have come to explore late-nineteenth-century cultural history. The White City lures me as well.

The image of pilgrims on a pilgrimage suits my purposes--my "sensational designs"--as it did for many. In her influential literary and cultural history Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 7790-1860 Jane Tompkins uses the phrase "sensational designs" not only as title but as thesis to explain the mission of popular women writers of the period. (3) Women writers were intent on shaping contemporary discourse through narrative. Fictional narratives often depict the protagonist's ethical journey as a pilgrimage. Tales of transformative journeys to a sacred center abound in mythic stories. The hero's path, so vividly detailed by folklorist Joseph Campbell, is both an outward and an inward experience. The ancient image of the labyrinth symbolizes the meandering path of the soul as it journeys from light to darkness to light again. The Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the holy texts of Hinduism and Buddhism all beckon believers toward the shrine of the prophets, the sites of miracles, the path toward enlightenment. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales narrates the experience of medieval pilgrims on one such journey, while Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress tells of another.

In story after story, tradition after tradition, the trope of quest marks the trials and tribulations of youth in transition and seeking transformation. In many plots the author assumes the role of spiritual guide as the young protagonist progresses toward maturity, as in Alcott's Little Women (1868), with its intentional parallels to Bunyan. The power of the pilgrim stems not only from the spiritual tradition but also from the sentimental tradition, the province of many women writers celebrated in the Woman's Building Library. Tompkins asserts that the popular domestic novel of the nineteenth century represents a larger mission to reshape culture from a woman's perspective, a revisionary, radical design. And so much depended on women. As Barbara Sicherman shows so well, "Women were integral to the culture of reading." (4) The care and education of children has traditionally been the domain of women, who took such responsibilities to heart through language and story. Commitment to this serious mission may have disadvantaged early writers for children, whose work appeared unpalatably didactic to later generations, inhibiting the free-spirited imagination and anarchic impulses of childhood. Yet women's roles involved sharing fantastic fairy tales, fables, and nursery rhymes as well as the more earnest moral tales. The genres they wrote and read to children became the stuff of literature for the child.

With women's cultural positioning as caretaker, as moral guide, and as teacher, children's literature became women's literature, reflecting a certain commonality of perspective. Women often interpreted their condition to be analogous to that of children as the Other, a marginalized figure in a patriarchal society. Women could impart conservative morals through their writing or subvert traditional mores through fantasy and satire. To chart the history of women writing children's literature over the last two centuries is to move from the role of instructor giving lessons, tried and true, to the role of storyteller identifying with the journey of their readers' trials and triumphs. The movement is subtle, as the didactic is ever there, threading the tale.

Frances Hodgson Burnett is such a storyteller and instructor. In Two Little Pilgrims' Progress she tells a journey-story as well as a journey-lesson. Her novel stars the two orphan children, Meg and Robin Macleod, who daydream as they read and reread The Pilgrim's Progress. Talk of the World's Fair touches that passion. The children save their money and travel to Chicago, where they move from life in the slums to adoption by benefactor John Holt. At the news of their adoption Meg cries, "'We have got into the City Beautiful, and you are going to let us live there always.'" (5) The journey had been achieved and yet it was still…