Part 7
Elia was not the sort of literary devotee to sanction anemic literature for children; his plea was for the vitalising of the nursery book. On October 23, 1802, he wrote to Coleridge:
“Mrs. Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics, ... and the shopman at Newbery’s hardly deign’d to reach them off an exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary ask’d for them. Mrs. B’s and Mrs. Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant and vapid as Mrs. B’s books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the shape of knowledge, and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers, when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such like; instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales which made the child a man while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child.”
He saw the penalty that lay in cramming the child with natural history instead of furnishing him with some creative appeal. We can forgive Elia all his pranks when he thus pleads the genial claim of imagination; if, in a witty vein, he called Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Inchbald the “bald” old women, we must understand that Lamb had his petulant hours, and that children’s literature of the day was sufficient to increase them!
The purport of “Evenings at Home” is instruction. Within the compass of a few pages, objects crowd one upon the other as thick and as fast as virtues do in Miss Edgeworth. Such keenness and alertness in observing common things, as are cultivated in “Eyes and No Eyes,” stagger the intellect. It is well to teach your young companions to feel the hidden possibilities of nature and to cultivate within them a careful observation; but there is a vacation time for the mind, and the world, though it may be a school-room, is also a very healthy place to play in. Mr. Andrews, the immaculate teacher, is represented by the artist, in my copy of the book, as seated in a chair, with a compass in one hand resting upon a book, while behind him stretches the outline of a map; the two boys stand in front of him like prisoners before the bar. Here then is a new algebraic formula in the literature for the young.
Mrs. Barbauld thus represents a transition stage in juvenile writing; education and narrative walk side by side. She made it possible, in the future, for Peter Parley and for Rollo to thrive. Thomas Day foreshadowed the method of retelling incidents from the classics and from standard history and travel,--a form which is practised to a great extent by our present writers, who thread diverse materials on a slender wire of subsidiary story, and who, like Butterworth and Knox, invent untiring families of travellers who go to foreign parts, who see things, and then who talk out loud about them.
But before this secularisation gained marked hold, a new tributary is to be noted, which flowed into the moral stream,--a tributary which afforded the moral impulse a definite field to work in, which centred its purpose upon a distinct class. For heretofore the writers of juvenile literature had aimed for a general appeal. The struggle was now to be between the Sunday-school and the text-book.
III. THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL; RAIKES; HANNAH MORE; MRS. TRIMMER.
If the Sunday-school movement had not assumed some proportions about this time, it would have been necessary to create a practical outlet for the moral energy which dominated the authors of whom we have been writing. Had Robert Raikes not conceived his plan when he did, the ethical impulse would have run riot in a much wilder fashion, and would have done no good at all. For, whatever may be said against the old-time Sunday-school in a critical vein, one cannot ignore that its establishment brought immediate benefit. As it was, the new institution furnished the objective point for which the didactic school was blindly groping, and developed the idea of personal service. The social ideal was beginning to germinate.
Robert Raikes (1735 or 6–1811) was by profession a printer. He was of benevolent disposition and met with much to arouse his sympathy for the lower classes, whom he found indifferent to religion and hopelessly uncouth in their daily living. With the religious revival which swept through England around 1770, caused by the preaching of George Whitefield, Raikes began his work in earnest, first among the city prisons, where he was brought in contact with surprising conditions which had long lain in obscurity because of a wide-spread public indifference.
His observation thus trained to follow along this particular social line, he soon became attracted toward the children apprenticed to a certain pin factory. He saw that the discipline of work, however exacting, however it denied them the care and attention due to all young persons, was the only restrictive guidance they had. When Sunday came, they ran wild, relieved of duty, and not imbued with any idea of personal control. Their elders were living immoral lives; they had no opportunity or incentive to improve; and their natural inclination was to follow animal impulse and blind desire. To such a religious man as Raikes, the mandate, “Suffer little children to come unto me,” was most naturally suggested by such circumstances. Some means of occupying these children on the Sabbath day must be devised.
So it was that on January 26, 1781, the first Sunday-school was opened. Raikes poured his whole energy into organization, and, through the medium of his own paper, the Gloucester _Journal_, spread broadcast his written suggestions about the work to be done, and his descriptions of the particular localities which most needed attention. He was in a position to gain publicity, and his own personal earnestness counted for a great deal. Already we have noted his relationship to Newbery, whose literary connections probably afforded Raikes some assistance.
The movement had been of five years’ growth, when, in 1786, Raikes was summoned before King George III. Their Majesties, both the King and Queen, were interested by what they had heard, and wished to know something more. The Queen was being almost daily enthused through the intensity of Mrs. Trimmer’s pleadings. This good lady, already known for her children’s books, had put into operation a Sunday-school of her own at Brentwood, and it was to this that the King had paid a memorable visit, leaving behind him a reputation for “kind and condescending behaviour,” which won the hearts of all the children. In this way was the official sanction placed upon Christianity as a practical force; there was even every prospect of starting a Sunday-school at Windsor. “A general joy reigns among the conductors,” cried the enthusiastic Mrs. Trimmer, when she realised what interest was being shown in every quarter.
The programme framed for Raikes’s little protégés was indeed sufficiently full to keep them from the highways. He writes:
“The children were to come after ten in the morning, and stay till twelve; they were then to go home and return at one; and after reading a lesson, they were to be conducted to Church. After Church, they were to be employed in repeating the catechism till after five, and then dismissed, with an injunction to go home without making a noise.”
Lamb and Leigh Hunt, when together at Christ Hospital, were regarded as veritable monks in their knowledge of the Bible; but these little waifs were slaves of a rigorous order; there was nothing voluntary in their desire for spiritual light. The time was to arrive when more sunshine was to be mixed with the teaching, but in the beginning it was necessary for Raikes to keep the Sabbath forcibly observed rather than to devise a less exacting routine. He went about, untiring in his efforts; he plead personally with parents, besides hoping that, through the moral instruction being given to their children, they might be made to see the outlet for their own salvation.
Years after, testimony was obtained from the survivors of Raikes’s discipline. One William Brick had been a scholar of his, and the memory of those days was vivid--perhaps a little too much so, but none the less picturesque:
“I can remember Mr. Raikes well enough,” he said. “I remember his caning me. I don’t suppose I minded it much. He used to cane boys on the back of a chair. Some terrible bad chaps went to school when I first went.... I know the parents of one or two of them used to walk them to school with 14-lb. weights tied to their legs, to keep them from running away.... When a boy was very bad, he would take him out of the school, and march him home and get his parents to ‘wallop’ him. _He’d stop and see it done_, and then bring the young urchin back, rubbing his eyes and other places.... Every one in the city loved and feared him.”
Such a scene is not prepossessing; nor does moral suasion appear to have been as efficacious as the rod. Besides which, Raikes had a way of looking at a trembling victim through his reading-glass, and exclaiming in thunderous voice: “Ah, I can see you did not say your prayers this morning.” An old man of eighty spoke of this circumstance with deep feeling; and, in awe-stricken tones, he ended by saying: “The boys believed he could see through stone walls with that glass; _and it magnified his eye_, so that they were sometimes frightened, and told wonderful stories about what Mr. Raikes could do with his wonderful glass.”
The immediate influence this movement had upon children’s books was to create a demand for tracts. Later on, after Thomas Carlyle, in 1839, had plead the cause of London public libraries, it suggested a special class of library as a part of the Sunday-school machinery. A general call was raised for juvenile books of a strictly religious nature, with an appeal intended for a poorer class of readers. Miss Hannah More represents the chief exponent of this grade of writing. “All service ranks alike with God,” says Browning. But these ladies, who were untiring in their devotion to the cause, who were, in their parochial character, forerunners of the social worker of to-day, each was known through her special interest. We speak of Miss Catherine Sinclair, author of “Holiday House,” as the first to introduce benches in the parks of Edinburgh, as the originator of drinking-fountains, as the founder of cooking-depots; of Priscilla Wakefield as the originator of savings-banks for the poor; of Miss More as the author of tracts; and of Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, one of the forgotten New-England writers, as the first to draw attention to the condition of the newsboys. Mrs. Trimmer, therefore, is justly connected with the history of the development of Sunday-schools.
In a tabular indication of the trend of juvenile literature, Sarah Kirby Trimmer (1741–1810) may be said to have been a disciple of Madame de Genlis and of Mrs. Barbauld, quite as much as a follower of Rousseau and of Raikes; she inherited from her father an overweening religious inclination, and several glimpses of her in the society of the day reveal how deeply seated her serious nature was. In London she talked with Dr. Johnson, Mr. Gainsborough, and Mr. Hogarth, and, through recognised powers of reading aloud, she charmed many of her friends. But it was a hopeless situation to cope with in a young girl, when, a dispute having arisen between Sir Joshua Reynolds and one of his friends, Sarah, being called upon to settle the point--a doubtful passage in “Paradise Lost”--drew the volume from the pocket of her skirt! At twenty-one she was married, destined to be the mother of six sons and six daughters, and no sooner was the first child born than she directed all of her attention, as Madame de Genlis did, to the subject of education.
Wearisome it is to come in contact with a person of one idea. Mrs. Trimmer naïvely confesses in her journal that she must have worn out the patience of many a visitor with her views upon education. As the years advanced, her opinions became more narrowed and more sectarian.
Mrs. Trimmer exhibited piety which was of the emotional, almost of the hysterical kind, yet sincere in its whole-souled acceptance of Bible truths. She questioned nothing; she believed with a simple faith that lacked proportion. One has to view her entirely from the standpoint of this single interest which had her under complete control. In her “Guardian of Education” she dwelt much upon the dangerous matter contained in children’s books; in her “New Plan of Education” she condemned any attempt to extend the scope of education for the poor. Her chief motive in both cases was to keep away from faith any cause of its possible undoing. The earnestness put into her charity work, her untiring devotion to the Sunday-school, a certain gentle charm of conversation won for Mrs. Trimmer wide-spread attention. Her life was guided by the belief in a divine mission; her days were well ordered, from the hours before breakfast, which she reserved for the learning of poetry, to the evenings, when she would give herself up to meditation and prayer. In fact, during twenty-five years, she kept a diary, penned in secret moments of retreat, a curious display of over-welling feeling--pietistical neurasthenia. These pages are hardly to be considered interpretative--they are outpourings, giving one an awful sense of unworthiness, if life consists simply in submitting to biblical strictures and in uttering biblical paraphrases.
But Mrs. Trimmer was withal an active little woman, whose three hours, spent every Sunday over her journal, represented meditation only: in her practise of Christianity she was zealous; and her pen was employed in preparing the kind of food to foster a proper feeling among children and cottagers and _servants_. In this latter respect there was a change indeed from Miss Edgeworth, who considered the advisability of separating young people entirely from any possible contact with servants.
Among her children and her grandchildren, Mrs. Trimmer exerted profound influence; the Sabbath day was observed with great strictness; toys set aside while Stackhouse’s “Commentary on the Bible”[34] was brought forth to look at; stories were told, and the progress of Bible heroes traced upon maps of the Holy Land. The spirit of rest and peace followed Mrs. Trimmer, who was averse to reading books of controversy. We are given a picture of her in her venerable old age, walking with her grandson among the plants and flowers, while she explained, with a certain lyric simplicity, the truths, as she saw them with her meek spirit, underlying the growth of the grass; and described the flight of a sparrow which escaped not the notice of God. There was thus unfolded to this little boy the holiness of all things in nature, permeated with a divine grace; he was made to consider the lilies of the field, and not a bush but might become to him a burning flame, not a stone but might be rent asunder by the resurrection of a dried-up seed.
Mrs. Trimmer’s “Easy Lessons for Children,” her “Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature,” her “Sacred History for Young Persons,” and her works explaining the catechism, were among the rare books available for the purposes of Raikes’s followers. They were easily understood; they explained satisfactorily for children, according to grown-up standards, certain religious teachings. In the Catholic church to-day, Mother Loyola is said to possess that same ability to unfold the meaning of the most difficult doctrine so that Catholic children can understand. Priests turn to her books rather than trust to their own interpretations. The general interest aroused for the poor, for the lower classes, appealed to Mrs. Trimmer; she became wholly absorbed; she wrote “The Servant’s Friend” and edited a “Family Magazine,” intended for their special instruction and amusement. Adopting Madame de Genlis’s idea of using prints as a factor in nursery education, she prepared a series of illustrations from ancient history and from the Old Testament; and was further engaged in the simplification of Roman and English history for young readers.
The book that has come down to us as representing Mrs. Trimmer’s work, “The History of the Robins,” is a nature story of no mean value, easy in narrative and full of appeal for very young persons who are interested in simple incident. To American readers it is now available in a cut-up state, for Dr. Edward Everett Hale, in editing it, called the style “stilted” and diffuse, and thought that its unity could better be preserved by dealing only with the robins, and not at all with the extraneous doings of the Benson family.
When the Lambs removed to Enfield in 1827, Thomas Westwood, a boy of thirteen, lived near them. It was not long before he and Elia were on intimate terms, and he must have had exceptional merit for Lamb to give him free entrée to his books. “Lamb,” so he has recorded, “initiated me into a school of literature which Mrs. Trimmer might not have considered the most salutary under the circumstances. Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Farquhar, Defoe, Fielding,--these were the pastures in which I delighted to graze in those early years; and which, in spite of Trimmer, I believe did me less evil than good.”
An alteration in attitude appears to have been going on in several directions; the social strata were readjusting themselves. For Hannah More (1745–1833), it is claimed, stood at the parting of the roadways, where clergymen and schoolmasters, once frowned upon as quite inferior beings, now took positions of a higher nature. Had Miss More not thrown herself so heartily into the moral movement, she might have occupied a much more important position in English letters than she does. One cannot help feeling that, by the part she took in the Sunday-school development, she sacrificed her genius to a cause. In the biographies of these well-intentioned writers for children and for poor people, it is always satisfactory to linger, wherever opportunity presents, on the genial aspects of their lives; they are estimated in criticism so greatly by the weight, or by the lack of weight, of their ideas, that the human value which existed at the time is often lost sight of. However dry their preachments, their social lives were warmed by human intercourse and human service. It is hard to forget such a group as Scott, Maria and Patty Edgeworth, and others, listening to Patty while she sang Irish melodies. A similar scene is associated with Sally and Hannah More when they went to call on Dr. Johnson. He was not at home, and the two, left together in the autocrat’s sanctum, disported themselves in mock humour. Hannah approached his great chair, and sat pompously in it, hoping to catch some of his genius. Can you not hear Johnson’s laughter as he bluntly told her, when he was informed of the incident, that he rarely sat in that particular chair?
Mrs. Barbauld was no less clever than Hannah More in the handling of witty verse; in fact, the latter was ever ready with her gifts in the drawing-room, and added generously her share to the circle gathered around the actor, David Garrick. He it was who had sufficient faith in Miss More’s dramatic ability to present two of her plays. Even at that time she had a reputation among her associates for being very strict in her religious observances; for one evening, it being Sunday, and Garrick not averse to piano-playing, he turned to “Nine,” as he called her, thus indicating that she was a favoured one among the muses, and told her to leave the room, promising to call her back when the music was over.
Hannah More’s social work is to be considered from the year (1789) that Mr. Wilberforce, one of her close friends, discovered the deplorable conditions existing in the districts around Cheddarcliff. Her long intercourse with the Garricks, and her various literary endeavours which took form during 1782 in her “Sacred Dramas” for the young, have no direct bearing upon her connection with the religious movement which places her in the general scheme with Robert Raikes and Mrs. Trimmer. Patty More had had, at an earlier period, large experience in school-teaching, and this was to prove of inestimable service, for it was with her assistance that Hannah carried on the work in the Mendip mining districts. The two met with some opposition, not only from the classes for whom they were specially striving, but from those who, less broad than themselves, held views regarding the Sunday-school that placed spirituality above the actual needs of the poverty-stricken communities. But, throughout, the Mores never swerved from their set purpose, even though illness overtook them and made the situation still harder than it was. For they were forced to ride many miles from their home, at first unknown in the region they had elected to benefit, a region cursed by ignorance, plagued by license, and wherein assault was a common incident.
“Miss Wilberforce would have been shocked,” writes Hannah More, “could she have seen the petty tyrants whose insolence we stroked, the ugly children we fondled, the pointers and spaniels we caressed, the cider we commended, and the wine we swallowed.”
A study of the centres established by these sisters, and which gradually exerted an influence over twenty-eight miles of territory, a distance traversed in a manner not unlike the journey of the circuit-riders who are to be met with throughout the mountain districts of the South, would throw considerable light on English labour conditions as they then existed. The setting is an isolated wild land, thus described by Miss More:
“Several of the grown-up youths had been tried at the last assizes; three were the children of a person lately condemned to be hanged; many thieves,--all ignorant, profane, and vicious beyond belief. Of this banditti, we have enlisted 170; and when the clergyman, a hard man, who is also the magistrate, saw these creatures kneeling around us, whom he had seldom seen but to commit, or punish in some way, he burst into tears.”
The work grew with the months, and mention is soon made of nine hundred children flocking to a Mendip feast--little ones whose brightest moments were centred in the regular visits of these ministering ladies.
Miss More’s powers were exerted toward counteracting the ideas being spread by the French Revolution; both high and low were struggling against them; they nearly swamped the genius of Wordsworth. Though she rejoiced in the fall of the Bastille, she deplored the deification of Nature and the reign of Reason, and vented her sarcasm on the philosophy of Paine. Her chief alarm was felt for the effect such opinions might have upon the middle class of England. But, despite her conservatism, Miss More was regarded as too strong-minded for religious work; the High Church accused her of too marked an independence. She was advised, much to her own amusement, to publish a confession of her faith. The discussion which ensued need not occupy us; it may, perhaps, have infused into her juvenile tracts a more determined tone, but it did not originally encourage her in their composition.