Part 6

The authors are never wanting in advice. If children are good, what need is there to introduce them to evil in their stories? Evil is here meant in its mildest sense. They should be kept from all contagion. But bad boys and girls should be told to read, in “The Children’s Friend,” tales like “The Little Gamblers” and “Honesty is the Best Policy,” which will teach them, by examples of wickedness, to correct their ways. Such strange classification suggests that literature was to be used as a species of moral reformatory. Two significant facts are to be noted in this chapter on books: there is an attempt to grade the literature by some age standard, bringing to light a gap between four and seven years which may be offset by a similar gap to-day; so, too, does there seem to have been, then as now, a great lack of history and biography.

The idea upon which the “Parent’s Assistant” was founded began to shape itself in Miss Edgeworth’s mind early in life. Left alone for a short period with her younger brothers and sisters, she manufactured tales for their edification, many of which, in after years, she utilised. In 1796 she gathered together and published some of her best stories, among them “The Purple Jar” and “Lazy Laurence.” “Simple Susan” would probably not be so widely emphasised were it not for the fact that Sir Walter Scott recorded “that when the boy brings back the lamb to the little girl, there is nothing for it but to put down the book and cry.”

Miss Edgeworth and her father had much preferred that the book be called “The Parent’s Friend,” for lodged in the former’s memory were disagreeable thoughts of an old-time arithmetic which had plagued her early years, and was named “The Tutor’s Assistant.”

The theatricals performed in the Edgeworth household afforded much pleasure. It is very likely that the custom was gleaned from Madame de Genlis. Plays were written for every festive season. The publication of the “Parent’s Assistant” suggested the acting of some of the playlets contained in the book. There seem to have been two theatres, one fitted up just over Richard Lovell’s study, and another temporary stage erected in the dining-room. Here, one evening, was enacted the exemplary dialogue of “Old Poz,” where a poor man is suspected, by a Justice, of stealing what a magpie has in reality secreted. Lucy, the good little daughter, clears the innocent fellow, upon whom her father sits in very stern, very unreasonable, and most unnatural judgment. Irritable to a degree, the Justice, who is positive about everything, shuts up any one who gainsays a word contrary to his obstinacy, but “Oh, darling,” he remarks to his daughter, after her excellent deed, “_you_ shall contradict me as often as you please.” This method is neither more nor less than poisonous; it is polluted with a certain license which no good action ever sanctions. There is small doubt that children see the absurdity of it, for it cheapens right-doing in their eyes.

The compensating balance of good and bad is exercised to a monotonous degree in Miss Edgeworth’s tales. There are the meek, innocent girl, and the proud, overbearing girl in “The Bracelet”; the heedless, extravagant boy, and the thoughtful, thrifty boy in “Waste Not, Want Not.” Disaster follows disaster; reward courts reward. Not content with using these extremes of human nature in one story, Miss Edgeworth rings the changes, slightly altered in form, in others of her tales.

“The Purple Jar” in substance is the same as “Waste Not, Want Not”; the moral applications are identical. One has but to glance through the pages of the latter story to note its didactic pattern. Yet Miss Edgeworth possessed her literary excellencies in human characterisation, in that power of narrative which gained effect, not through ornamentation, but through deep knowledge of the real qualities of common existence. The dominant fault is that she allowed her ultimate object to become crystallised into an overshadowing bulwark, a danger which always besets the “moral” writer, and produces the ethical teacher in a most obtruding form. When Miss Edgeworth’s little girl sprains her ankle and her father picks her up, she consciously covers her leg with her gown. Fate seems never to have worked so swiftly, so determinedly, as in those tales where thoughtless boys on their walks had the consequences of their bad acts visited upon them during the homeward journey. The hungry, the lame, the halt, the blind turn unexpected corners, either to wince beneath the jeers of one type of mortal child, or to smile thanks to the other kind for a gentle word or a much-needed penny.

No one can wholly condemn the tale, typified by Miss Edgeworth’s “Parent’s Assistant.” Childhood is painted in quaint, old-fashioned colours, even though the staid little heroes and heroines have no interests. They take information into their minds as they would take physic into their bodies. They are all normal types, subjected to abnormal and unnaturally successive temptations, and given very exacting consciences. A writer in _Blackwood’s_ becomes indignant over such literary treatment:

“They [the girls] have good reason to expect from these pictures of life, that if they are very good and very pious, and very busy in doing grown-up work, when they reach the mature age of sixteen or so, some young gentleman, who has been in love with them all along, will declare himself at the very nick of time; and they may then look to find themselves, all the struggles of life over, reposing a weary head on his stalwart shoulder.... Mothers, never in great favour with novelists, are sinking deeper and deeper in their black books,--there is a positive jealousy of their influence; while the father in the religious tale, as opposed to the moral and sentimental, is commonly either a scamp or nowhere. The heroine has, so to say, to do her work single-handed.”

What is true of these young people is therefore likewise true of their grown-up associates. They have definite personalities, and they are either monstrosities of excellence or demons of vice and temper. But here also a careful distinction was preserved. Mr. Lucas says in his “Old-Fashioned Tales”:

“The parents who can do no wrong are very numerous; but they are, it should be pointed out, usually the parents of the central child. There are very often parents and relations of other and subsidiary children whose undesirable habits are exceedingly valuable by way of contrast.”

Despite the fact that there is so much to condemn in this _genre_ of writing, Miss Edgeworth was endowed with that sober sense and inexhaustible power of invention claimed for her by critics of the period. Her care for detail, her exhibition of small actions that mark the manners of all people in different walks of life, were distinguishing features of her skill.

With her father Miss Edgeworth laboured on other things besides the “Practical Education”; while the two were preparing the essay on “Irish Bulls,” published in 1802, she plainly states that the first design was due to him, and that in her own share she was sedulously following the ideas suggested by him. Throughout her autobiographical data she offers us many glimpses of that family unity which existed--whether from voluntary desire or because of the domineering grip of Edgeworth, is not stated. She was continuously solicitous for his welfare, not through any forced sense of duty, but because of her desire to give pleasure in small ways; she found it agreeable to sit of an evening doing needle work, while Edgeworth “read out” Pope’s Homer. In the course of such hours she first became acquainted with Scott’s “Lady of the Lake” and “Waverley.”

The friendship between Miss Edgeworth and Scott was deep and cordial; one was not without abiding influence on the other. She describes with graphic pen the first sound of his voice at Abbotsford; and the biographer has no more agreeable material to work upon than her fortnight spent as a guest of the novelist, and his return visit to Edgeworthtown in 1825.

For a man whose avowed detestation of women was well known to every one, Thomas Day (1748–1789) succeeded in leading a life of romantic variety. Yet he was not a person of strong passion; in fact, was more inclined to brooding melancholy. His intimacy with the Edgeworth family began when he met Richard Lovell at Oxford; and it was when he saw the training of Émile applied to his friend’s son that his mind was seized with the idea of carrying out a similar scheme himself. He held a great contempt for dress; and his numerous vagaries regarding the conduct and duties of a wife were so pronounced that it is most likely they came between himself and Maria Edgeworth, with whom it is thought there was some romantic understanding.

Unlike Edgeworth, Day had no child to experiment upon. So he set about “breeding up” two girls, away from conflicting influences, and according to nature. One was obtained from an orphan asylum, and was known as Sabrina Sidney; the other, called Lucretia, was taken from a Foundling Hospital. In order to give a moral tone to the situation, these girls were bound out to Edgeworth, who was a married man. Not many knew that Day had hastened with both of the damsels to Avignon. Here he began to educate them with the intention of training one for his future wife.

Events did not progress smoothly, however; the girls quarrelled as saints would have quarrelled under the circumstances, and they occupied their time by falling out of boats and having smallpox. What their schooling consisted of may be imagined from the fragment of a letter written by Sabrina to Mr. Edgeworth:

“I hope I shall have more sense against I come to England--I know how to make a circle and an equilateral triangle--I know the cause of day and night, winter and summer.”

At the advanced age of twenty-two--even younger than Edgeworth when he first became imbued with the Rousseau doctrines--Day returned to Lichfield--the home of Johnson and of Dr. Charles Darwin--bringing with him his charges: Lucretia, who was hopelessly dull, and Sabrina, who proved the favourite and was by far the more attractive of the two, with her fetching auburn ringlets, her long amorous eyelashes, and her very melodious voice. The young ladies had failed to become thoroughly steeled against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. In most respects they persisted in remaining like the average woman with sensibility. When hot sealing-wax was dropped upon the shapely arm of Sabrina, to harden her against the fear of pain, she refused to behave heroically; when a pistol was fired at her petticoats--a volley of lead for all she knew--her screams and frantic jumps indicated that her nerves were not impervious to the unexpected.

Day did not fail to show his disgust and disappointment. While Sabrina was at boarding-school, he hastened to forget all about her, and fell in love with Honora Sneyd, whose fame chiefly rests upon the fact that she was once courted by Major André. To make the situation more awkward, Edgeworth, despite his married state, likewise possessed strong affection for the same lady. She refused Day, and what followed contains the zest of a wicked little comedy. He fell ill, and had to be bled; then he summoned up sufficient strength to escape to France with Edgeworth, who felt it best to remove himself from temptation. It was during this trip that he visited Rousseau with poor little Richard. But before crossing the Channel, Day had succeeded in transferring his affections to Honora’s sister, Elizabeth.

“Go,” she said to him in substance, “try to assume some of the graces that you sorely lack. Learn to dress stylishly, and be taught the proper curl for a wig. Train yourself into a fashionable-looking husband, and come back to me.”

Thus commanded, Day spent many weary hours wielding the foil, and being carried through the intricacies of the dance. And those legs of his--how he put them into exercise, hoping against hope to straighten them ere he returned to England!

But there was evidently no improvement in the end, for when the lady saw him, she unhesitatingly refused him. It is sufficient to say that, in time, Edgeworth married both sisters, Death regarding kindly his love of novelty.

With affections thus left high and dry, Day turned once more to Sabrina. He had long ago discarded Lucretia, who apprenticed herself to a milliner, and later became the wife of an honest draper. But Sabrina was fair to look upon and Day saw no reason why she should not satisfy his ideas of wifehood, provided she would dress according to his tastes. We applaud the shake of those auburn ringlets as she refused his wishes, and thus escaped matrimony with him.[32] There was another lady upon whom this honour was to descend.

When Miss Milnes, of Wakefield, was approached by Day, she was informed of all his requirements, and was deceived as to none of his vagaries. It must have been somewhat of a surprise to him when she accepted him, outlandish attire and all; and it is a pleasant disappointment to know that the marriage was a happy one, despite the fact that Mrs. Day insisted upon holding opinions of her own.

Day was most content when he was theorising; at the same time, it must not be lost sight of that he had timely interests. His feelings were strongly aroused against the state of negro slavery in America, and he was earnest in his advocacy of parliamentary reform. His great fault was that he was always carried to extremes whenever good motives prompted him. His earnest concern for the poor, during 1781, was accompanied by stern denials of pleasures for himself,--well-nigh of the necessities of life.

Day realised the failures of his theories as applied to grown people; had he not done so, we most likely would not have had “Sandford and Merton.” His attention was soon attracted to the infant mind as an unworked field; the Edgeworths were meeting success with their children’s books; he would attempt the same thing, and so, during 1783, 1787, and 1789, the three successive volumes of his famous story appeared--an elongated “Waste Not, Want Not.”

Day had heretofore suggested a certain effeminate bearing in his character; he recognised it, and was now suddenly beset with a consuming desire to supplant this manner by an overtowering manliness, by the exercise of firmness and strength. But the new policy was to prove his undoing. On the afternoon of September 28, 1789, he went to ride on an unbroken horse, believing to curb him by the discipline of command rather than of the stock. The animal took fright and threw him; he received injuries from which he almost immediately died. On the evidence of Miss Seward, it is recorded that Mrs. Day thereafter “lay in bed, into the curtains of which no light was admitted, ... and only rose to stray alone through her garden when night gave her sorrows congenial gloom.”

The estimate of such a work as “Sandford and Merton” cannot be based upon modern standards; all of the factors characteristic of the didactic writers for children, such as persistent questioning, the encyclopædic grown person in the shape of Mr. Barlow, and the monotonous interchange of narrative and dialogue, are employed as vehicles for knowledge. The book is unique, inasmuch as it sought to supply a variety of stories suitable in style and content for the beginner.

“The only method I could invent,” writes Day, “was to select such passages of different books as were most adapted to their experience and understanding. The least exceptionable that I could find for this purpose were Plutarch’s Lives, and Zenophon’s History of the Institution of Cyrus, in English translations; with some part of Robinson Crusoe, and a few passages in the first volume of Mr. Brook’s Fool of Quality.”

In those days, if authors are to be believed, birds were in the habit of alighting on the hands of good children; they are more timid now, though children are not less good. The poor boy was made to feel how kind the good rich boy was to him throughout his shocking adversity; we are more considerate to-day. And so, Tommy Merton and Harry Sandford, products of a stilted age, are clad in uniforms similar to those worn by Miss Edgeworth’s children. They are endowed with no exceptional qualities, with no defined will power; they stand in a long row of similarly subjected slaves of theory.

Miss Agnes Repplier calls this story one of her early moral pitfalls. She read it at a period when information was being forced down her, and “which,” so she writes, “I received as responsively as does a Strassburg goose its daily share of provender.”

Among the writers of this period, none are more important than Anna Letitia Aikin Barbauld (1743–1825). Her position is a unique one, for, being acquainted with all of her literary contemporaries and subject to their influence, she stands in a transition stage. Through her mental independence, she succeeded partially in breaking from the introspective method of motive-hunting, and foreshadowed the possibilities of Mrs. Hemans, the Brontés, and Mrs. Browning. She was reared in an atmosphere of intellectuality by her father, John Aikin, a professor and a man of advanced opinions regarding female instruction, two points which argued for her less conventional mind and for her less stilted manner.

When she married Rochemont Barbauld, who had been a student under her father, and who was a non-conformist, she was well versed in Greek and Latin, and in every way was equipped to do literary work. She was more or less influenced by her husband’s religious independence; he changed his congregation from English Presbyterianism to Unitarianism, and it is not surprising to find the English public looking somewhat askance at Mrs. Barbauld’s fitness to write for children. Madame de Genlis was in like fashion criticised for the religious views she held, and we shall find Miss More subject to the same scrutiny. The Aikins were the first to introduce the material lines in children’s literature, “but the more anxiously religious mothers felt a certain distrust of the absence of direct lessons in Christian doctrines; and Mrs. Trimmer was incited to begin a course of writing for young people that might give the one thing in which, with all their far superior brilliancy, the Aikins were felt to be deficient.”

We are not concerned with all of Mrs. Barbauld’s work; she used to write poetry, some of it in repartee vein which struck the acute fancy of Charles Lamb; her essays were of an exceptional order, in a few instances expressed in imitation of Johnson; he himself had to acknowledge that of all who tried to ape him, she was most successful. Her educational opinions, sent from time to time in letters to Mrs. Montague, marked her ability as a teacher; but the method that she believed in was well nigh Socratic and ofttimes wearisome in its persistency; history and geography were given to infant minds in the form of lectures. Around 1802 William Godwin, of whom we shall have something to say later in his connection with the Lambs, wrote:

“I think Mrs. Barbauld’s little books admirably adapted, upon the whole, to the capacity and amusement of young children.... As far as Mrs. Barbauld’s books are concerned, I have no difficulty. But here my judgment and the ruling passion of my contemporaries divide. They aim at cultivating one faculty; I should aim at cultivating another.... Without imagination, there can be no genuine ardour in any pursuit or for any acquisition, and without imagination there can be no genuine morality, in profound feeling of other men’s sorrow, no ardent and persevering anxiety for their interests. This is the faculty which makes the man, and not the miserable minuteness of detail about which the present age is so uneasy.”

Childless herself, Charles Aikin was adopted by Mrs. Barbauld, the little Charles of “Early Lessons for Children,” composed especially for him. The latter work was followed by “Hymns in Prose for Children,” consisting of translations from all tongues, put into simple language, and not into verse, for fear they might fail to reach the comprehension otherwise. These hymns are probably most representative of Mrs. Barbauld’s individual writings, for the work by which she is best known, the “Evenings at Home,” was written in collaboration with her brother, Dr. Aikin.

In the “Evenings” a new tone is detected; despite a stilted style, the two authors aroused an interest in external objects, and, by their descriptions and suggestions, attempted to infuse meaning into the world surrounding the child. This small departure from the sectarian tendency prevailing in so much of the literature of that period, imperceptible though it may be, was due to a shifting of attitude toward women which was taking place in England. Mrs. Barbauld might be considered a “bold” example of feminine intellect reaching out for a larger sphere. We read that Fox was surprised that a woman could exhibit such clearness and consistency of viewpoint as were to be discovered in such of her essays as “Monastic Institutions”; and there were others who wondered at the alertness and interest she manifested in all matters pertaining to public affairs. Her force of intellect pleased some, her manner others. Scott confessed that her public reading of poetry inspired him to court the muse; Wordsworth unfolded so far as to envy the beauty of her stanzas on “Life,” which toward the end contain these attractive, hopeful, and faith-abiding lines:

“Life! we’ve been long together, Through pleasant and through cloudy weather; ’Tis hard to part when friends are dear; Perhaps ’twill cost a sigh, a tear; Then steal away, give little warning, Choose thine own time; Say not good-night, but in some brighter clime, Bid me good-morning.”

Mrs. Barbauld was one of a group of women writers, seeking through the force of their opinions to destroy the conventional barriers which kept the exercise of feminine minds within prescribed bounds. Harriet Martineau has outlined the tyrannical limitations which beset a young girl of the early nineteenth century; decorum stood for mental annihilation. When genteel persons came to call at the home of Jane Austen, the latter, out of regard for family feeling, and for fear of being thought forward and unmaidenly, was constrained to cover her manuscript with a muslin scarf.

Mrs. Barbauld did not make any revolutionary declaration, nor attempt any public defiance of custom; however, she did, by her reaching toward the manifest facts of life, secularise our concern for the common things about us. She encouraged, through her plea for the freedom of thought, the movement which resulted in the emancipation of her sex, and which found vent, on the one hand, in Mary Wollstonecraft’s[33] “The Right of Woman” (1792) and, on the other, with more determined force, in John Stuart Mill’s “On the Subjection of Women” (1869). As this freedom became more and more assured, there underwent a change in the educational attitude; a girl’s mind had something more to work on than the motto of a sampler; her occupations became somewhat altered. And the women writers began to emphasise, in their stories for children, the individual inclinations of hero and heroine.

Wherever Charles Lamb discourses upon books, he assumes the critical attitude that deals with literature as a living force, as something built for human appeal. He met Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Trimmer on several occasions, and we can imagine the delight he took in shocking their ladylike senses by his witty and sudden remarks. At one period some dispute and ill-feeling existed between himself and Mrs. Barbauld, due to a false report that she had lampooned his drama, “John Woodvil.”