Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

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2. Introduction: Eighteenth-Century Childhoods and Literary Cultures

   • Andrew O’Malley

   Pages 1-11

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3. Status and Contexts of Childhood

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 13-13

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   2. Age, Status, and Reading in the Eighteenth Century

      • Teresa Michals

      Pages 15-33

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   3. Circulating Childhood in Eighteenth-Century England: The Cultural Work of Periodicals

      • Anja Müller

      Pages 35-50

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   4. Wards and Apprentices: The Legal and Literary Construction of the Familial Position of the Child

      • Cheryl Nixon

      Pages 51-74

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   5. ‘Pray lett none see this impertinent Epistle’: Children’s Letters and Children in Letters at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

      • Adriana Benzaquén

      Pages 75-96

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4. Reading, Pedagogy, and the Child’s Mind

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 97-97

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   2. Learned Pigs and Literate Children: Becoming Human in Eighteenth-Century Literary Cultures

      • Ann Wierda Rowland

      Pages 99-115

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   3. Eighteenth-Century Children’s Poetry and the Complexity of the Child’s Mind

      • Louise Joy

      Pages 117-138

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   4. ‘Powers Expanding Slow’: Children’s ‘Unfolding’ Minds in Radical Writing of the 1790s

      • Susan Manly

      Pages 139-162

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   5. Mediocrity: Mechanical Training and Music for Girls

      • Donelle Ruwe

      Pages 163-188

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   6. From Wild Fictions to Accurate Observation: Domesticating Wonder in Children’s Literature of the Late Eighteenth Century

      • Richard De Ritter

      Pages 189-209

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   7. ‘To Communicate Energy’: Eliza Fenwick Cultures the New-World Child

      • Lissa Paul

      Pages 211-225

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5. Shifting Representations and Meanings of Childhood

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 227-227

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   2. In the Margins: Children and Graphic Satire in the Eighteenth Century and Early Nineteenth Century

      • Sebastian Mitchell

      Pages 229-259

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   3. Redefining the Gothic Child: An Educational Experiment?

      • Jessica R. Evans

      Pages 261-279

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   4. Lemuel Haynes and ‘Little Adults’: Race and the Prehistory of Childhood in Early New England

      • Jennifer Thorn

      Pages 281-299

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6. Back Matter

   Pages 301-315

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The essays in this volume offer fresh and innovative considerations both of how children interacted with the world of print, and of how childhood circulated in the literary cultures of the eighteenth century. They engage with not only the texts produced for the period’s newly established children’s book market, but also with the figure of the child as it was employed for a variety of purposes in literatures for adult readers. Embracing a wide range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives and considering a variety of contexts, these essays explore childhood as a trope that gained increasing cultural significance in the period, while also recognizing children as active agents in the worlds of familial and social interaction. Together, they demonstrate the varied experiences of the eighteenth-century child alongside the shifting, sometimes competing, meanings that attached themselves to childhood during a period in which it became the subject of intensified interest in literary culture.

• Education
• Poetry
• Novel
• Children's literature
• Print culture
• childhood studies

• Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada

  Andrew O'Malley

Andrew O’Malley is Associate Professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century (2003) and of Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe (2012).

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