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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University
AT THE BREAK OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, THAT MOST ROMANTIC DEsire, the longing for childhood, produced one of the most romantic images, the innocent child of nature. Emotion and image were manifestations of a yearning for the past which we have since called nostalgia. It, too, is a romantic phenomenon (although the word was not widely used until the twentieth century), appearing first in England in medical reports of 1787 about a Welsh soldier suffering from homesickness. (1) We also think of "childhood" as a romantic invention, if only because of historical coincidence; for by the last years of the eighteenth century, children were viewed as autonomous beings rather than mere extensions of a patriarchal family. This change may have been relatively recent, if one accepts the theories of Philippe Aries and Laurence Stone; or it may have been far more gradual, if one believes their opponents. (2) A more compelling or immediate reason for considering childhood an English romantic phenomenon is Wordsworth: in early poems like "We are Seven," and "Lucy Gray," he portrayed the essential autonomy of an innocent or mythic child whose lineage stretched back to Pelagius. (3) Yet this child of nature became in Wordsworth's translation a retrospective phenomenon, one from whom the subject felt sadly distant. The "Ode: Intimations of Immortality ..." in which the poet speaks directly about longing for a lost childhood, and "Lucy Gray," in which the figure of childhood disappears, both convey the wonder and desire adults invested in trying to remember their past, unsocialized selves. (4)
During the nineteenth century, the concept of childhood was often the subjective product of individual narration, of a particular life history. Whether an infinitely recessive object of nostalgia, as it is in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), or a locus created for a discarded self, as it is in Mary and Charles Lamb's Mrs. Leicester's School (1809), childhood was a construction--immediate and temporary, an extension of present circumstances. For this reason, the image of the child in texts about childhood was a memorative device often working in the absence of conscious remembering. Wordsworth, for instance, in "The Pet-lamb" (1800), channeled nostalgia through the prevailing view of the child as a developing and imperfect being, one I shall call the "imitative child" because in light-hearted visual and verbal representations drawing from this belief, he or she usually appeared in the act of rehearsing adult behavior. Unlike the child of nature with which the poet is usually associated, this child was primarily a social entity. If it returned the viewer to childhood (and I believe it could), it did so through emotional attachment. But so, indeed, does the elusive child of nature in the famous "Lucy Gray" (1799). Indeed both "Lucy Gray" and "The Pet-lamb" employ a pre-romantic iconology of the child for sentimental effects--a practice later writers like Tennyson and Dickens would adopt. Both poems dramatize, furthermore, a nostalgia involving dramatic forms of identification which have little to do with experienced interiority or private memory, with organic form or autonomy--all elements of the self so intertwined, in theory, with the new concept of childhood.
The Terms of Childhood
In the nineteenth century, nostalgia for childhood usually referred to condition rather than duration; in doing so it rendered an already unstable concept even more fluid. By "child" or "childhood," writers might have meant any period from infancy through young adulthood. Definitions tended to emerge from contexts, betraying confusion and creativity. John Ruskin, at 69 hoping to marry 21-year-old Kathleen Olander, was not "quite clear," he complained to her, "whether you are a child ...--a pretty girl--or a clever--woman!" Calling her "my dearest child," he adds, anxiously, "Do you really like me to call you that--though you won't answer for anything more?" (5) One might argue that in this example "child" is an intentional figure of speech and that even today "child" and "childhood" often appear as metaphors. Yet Ruskin's disregard of any chronological limits to childhood is symptomatic of its uncertain duration in nineteenth-century social practices. Our modern precision about age, established through law and reinforced through medical regulation, makes the nineteenth-century terms of childhood appear almost arbitrary in comparison. In his recent book on Victorian childhood, James Kincaid announces, "My 'child' ... is not defined or controlled by age limits since it seems to me that anyone between the ages of one day and 25 years or beyond might, in different contexts play that role" (5). In her study of the same period Carolyn Steedman writes helpfully, "Childhood was a category of dependence, a term that defined certain relationships of powerlessness, submission and bodily inferiority or weakness, before it became descriptive of chronological age" (7). (6) The freedom to set the bounds of childhood--one's own or others'--is a result of different and sometimes disjunctive definitions that also have varied with class and through time.
The term of childhood was hard to fix in part because until 1836 the public registration of birth was not standardized, and because even after this date it was often difficult to discover a person's exact age. (7) The demarcation between childhood and adulthood did change, as Kincaid states, with context; but although various understandings of the periods of life had existed in each era since antiquity, terminology rarely clarified the duration of childhood. If "manhood" in the classical definition began at 28, did childhood encompass "boyhood" (as well as "girlhood") or, an alternative designation, "youth," which lasted through secondary school? Did childhood include "infancy," which traditionally could range from birth to 14 years, or according to Thomas Jameson's reclassification of 1811, only to age seven, after which puberty begins? (Steedman 65). Various answers have been offered. In Emile (English translation, 1762), Rousseau marks the end of infancy and the beginning of childhood with the acquisition of language (reminding us that "infans" means "unable to speak"), but otherwise views the years between birth and 15 as a relatively blissful period, during which desire does not exceed physical strength. Puberty ends this happy equilibrium. (8) But often biology did not corroborate legal definitions of childhood. Presumably the age at which a girl and boy could legally marry should have marked the definitive limit of childhood. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the age of marriageability, which was 14 for boys and 12 for girls, did not necessarily coincide with the age of sexual readiness or with the age of consent. (9) A rise in the legal age of consent through the nineteenth century (from 10 before 1861 to 16 in 1885) suggested a longer official understanding of childhood, as Kincaid argues; but it also raised the possibility of marriage, contracted and consensual, between persons who were adults in a biological but not a legal sense. Would persons by law denied autonomy but able to marry, either by the arrangements of their parents or by elopement (prompted by sexual readiness), be considered children? If so, what did it mean to be a child in such circumstances?
The eligible age of employment to mark the end of childhood is likewise unhelpful in setting the terms of childhood, not least because it varied among occupations and pertained chiefly to the working classes. Because of the use of child labor in industrializing countries, the protraction of legal childhood occurred largely among the middle classes and reached laboring and rural society much later. Aries suggests that in France the demand for labor in the textile mills curtailed childhood in the perception of the working classes (376). In the public outrage over "child labor" in England during the first half of the nineteenth century, we may, however, detect a rudimentary notion of childhood, a sense of a social violation of a biological category even though, as E. P. Thompson has shown, working children had been integral to the family economy long before they became a topic of controversy in the 1830s. (10) "Childhood" may have emerged as an issue of industrialization, these facts suggest. Yet we cannot fix periods of childhood when speaking generally of the lower classes. Whereas in the forties children under eight were barred from working in factories, and those under ten from laboring in mines, the minimum age (7) of theatrical employment was not set until 1889 (Steedman 136-37). Moreover, in the campaigns to shorten work hours, children were grouped with women. In these legal and social contexts, children and childhood had no inherent qualities, apart from size, separating them from adult dependents.
In Linda Pollock's judicious reasoning, the concept of childhood was more likely "elaborated" through the centuries than suddenly "born" (94). But the growing awareness of childhood through the nineteenth century did not bring a stable, shared definition of the phase, only a sense that it differed somehow from adult life and lasted longer than it had centuries before. Alice Meynell, writing in the 1890s, treated childhood as a late romantic phenomenon and defined it as a period separate from youth, which was the age of sexual readiness or at least accepted eligibility for marriage. The "fashion of hurrying childhood" persisted, she declares, through the first two decades of the nineteenth century (through Keats, she declares). Joseph Addison, she relates, thought of a 14 year-old child as a young woman in an attempt to prolong youth at the expense of "the bloom of ... childhood." (11) John Evelyn describes Mrs. Godolphin, Maid of Honour to the Queen in the court of Charles II, as a paragon of wit at age 13. Quattrocento art "abolished little girls," Meynell writes; they are missing from religious painting, except for an "education of the virgin" or girl saints refusing suitors (256). Likewise the literary tradition of carpe diem scanted childhood for the richer subject of youth. Meynell--who under the influence of Ruskin's "Fairy Land" (1883) would write Children of the Old Masters" in 1903, a study of the few examples in Italian painting that depict children as childlike--thought boys, too, were rushed through childhood. The finding of the boy Christ in the temple might have furnished a model of the precocious child for proud and bereaved fathers such as John Evelyn who, when...
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