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LITERARY CULTURES AND CHILDHOODS

Literary Cultures
and
Eighteenth-
Century
Childhoods
Edited by Andrew O’Malley
Literary Cultures and Childhoods

Series Editor
Lynne Vallone
Department of Childhood Studies
Rutgers University
Camden, NJ, USA
Scholarly interest in the literary figure of the child has grown exponentially
over the last thirty years or so due, in part, to the increased attention given
to children’s literature within the academy and the development of the
multidisciplinary field of Childhood Studies.
Given the crucial importance of children to biological, social, cultural
and national reproduction, it is not surprising that child and adolescent
characters may be found everywhere in Anglo-American literary expres-
sions. Across time and in every literary genre written for adults as well as
in the vast and complex array of children’s literature, ‘the child’ has func-
tioned as a polysemous and potent figure. From Harry Potter to Huck
Finn, some of the most beloved, intriguing and enduring characters in
literature are children.
The aim of this finite five-book series of edited volumes is to chart rep-
resentations of the figure of the child in Anglo-American literary cultures
throughout the ages, mapping how they have changed over time in differ-
ent contexts and historical moments. Volumes move chronologically from
medieval/early modern to contemporary, with each volume addressing a
particular period (eg ‘The Early Modern Child’, ‘The Nineteenth Century
Child’ etc). Through the aggregate of the essays, the series will advance
new understandings of the constructions of the child and the child within
different systems (familial, cultural, national), as communicated through
literature. Volumes will also serve, collectively, as an examination of the
way in which the figure of the child has evolved over the years and how
this has been reflected/anticipated by literature of the time.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15353
 Andrew O’Malley
Editor

Literary Cultures and

Eighteenth-Century
Childhoods
Editor
Andrew O’Malley
Ryerson University
Toronto, ON, Canada

Literary Cultures and Childhoods

ISBN 978-3-319-94736-5    ISBN 978-3-319-94737-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94737-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956866

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Peter Stone / Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the series editor, Lynne Vallone, for approaching me
to be the editor of this volume; she has afforded me a wonderful opportu-
nity to work with many scholars whose research I already admired and to
get to know others whose scholarship has been an exciting revelation to
me. In the editing of this volume, I have benefitted greatly from the assis-
tance of two research assistants from the Literatures of Modernity gradu-
ate program at Ryerson University: Erin Della Mattia and Danielle Waite.
Thank you both for your careful and attentive work on these chapters. I
would also like to acknowledge the Faculty of Arts at Ryerson University
for its support in the completion of this volume. Finally, I want to express
my gratitude to my wife, Nima Naghibi, and our children, Safianna and
Cyrus; it is as always your love and support that makes everything
possible.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction: Eighteenth-Century Childhoods and

Literary Cultures  1
Andrew O’Malley

Section I Status and Contexts of Childhood  13

2 Age, Status, and Reading in the Eighteenth Century 15

Teresa Michals

3 Circulating Childhood in Eighteenth-­Century England:

The Cultural Work of Periodicals 35
Anja Müller

4 Wards and Apprentices: The Legal and Literary

Construction of the Familial Position of the Child 51
Cheryl Nixon

5 ‘Pray lett none see this impertinent Epistle’: Children’s

Letters and Children in Letters at the Turn of the
Eighteenth Century 75
Adriana Benzaquén

vii
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viii CONTENTS

Section II Reading, Pedagogy, and the Child’s Mind  97

6 Learned Pigs and Literate Children: Becoming Human in

Eighteenth-Century Literary Cultures 99
Ann Wierda Rowland

7 Eighteenth-Century Children’s Poetry and the

Complexity of the Child’s Mind117
Louise Joy

8 ‘Powers Expanding Slow’: Children’s ‘Unfolding’ Minds

in Radical Writing of the 1790s139
Susan Manly

9 Mediocrity: Mechanical Training and Music for Girls163

Donelle Ruwe

10 From Wild Fictions to Accurate Observation:

Domesticating Wonder in Children’s Literature of the
Late Eighteenth Century189
Richard De Ritter

11 ‘To Communicate Energy’: Eliza Fenwick Cultures the

New-World Child211
Lissa Paul

Section III Shifting Representations and Meanings of

Childhood 227

12 In the Margins: Children and Graphic Satire in the

Eighteenth Century and Early Nineteenth Century229
Sebastian Mitchell
 CONTENTS ix

13 Redefining the Gothic Child: An Educational

Experiment?261
Jessica R. Evans

14 Lemuel Haynes and ‘Little Adults’: Race and the

Prehistory of Childhood in Early New England281
Jennifer Thorn

Index 301
 Notes on Contributors

Adriana Benzaquén is an Associate Professor in the Department of

History at Mount Saint Vincent University (Halifax, Canada). She is the
author of Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment
in the Study of Human Nature (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006)
and of articles on children and youth, health and medicine, human sci-
ence, and friendship in early modern and Enlightenment Europe.
Her current research project is a study of children and child-adult
relations in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth cen-
turies, focusing on the children in John Locke’s circle of friends and
acquaintances.
Richard De Ritter is a Lecturer in the School of English at the University
of Leeds. He has published on a range of eighteenth-century and Romantic
writing, including articles on James Boswell, Maria Edgeworth, and
Elizabeth Hamilton. His book, Imagining Women Readers, 1789–1820:
Well-Regulated Minds, was published by Manchester University Press
in 2014. He is currently working on a new book project entitled
Domesticating Wonder: Women Writing for Children, 1778–1832.
Jessica R. Evans received her Ph.D. in English Literature at the University
of Kentucky. Currently, she is an Instructor of English in Humanities and
Social Sciences and Sigma Kappa Delta Faculty Sponsor at Columbia State
Community College. She teaches, lectures, and writes on a variety of
topics, such as eighteenth-century British literature, development of the
Gothic mode, and children’s literature.

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Louise Joy is a Fellow and Senior Lecturer in English at Homerton

College, University of Cambridge. She is the co-editor of two volumes of
essays, Poetry and Childhood (2010) and The Aesthetics of Children’s
Poetry: A Study of Children’s Verse in English (2017). Her first mono-
graph, Literature’s Children: The Critical Child and the Art of Idealisation,
will be published later this year by Bloomsbury Academic. She has
published widely on topics relating to eighteenth-century literature,
to children’s literature, and to the history of the emotions. Her arti-
cles have appeared in journals including Studies in Romanticism,
Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, History of European Ideas,
Philosophy and Literature, and European Romantic Review.
Susan Manly is a Reader in English at the University of St Andrews and
the author of Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s: Locke, Tooke,
Wordsworth, Edgeworth (2007). She is currently writing a book on late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century radical and reformist writing for
children, Schools for Treason, and a political and intellectual biography of
Maria Edgeworth. She is also the editor of Maria Edgeworth’s
Harrington and Practical Education and the co-editor of Helen and
Leonora, all in the 12-volume The Novels and Selected Works of Maria
Edgeworth (1999–2003), and the editor of Maria Edgeworth: Selected
Tales for Children and Young People (Palgrave, 2013).
Teresa Michals is an Associate Professor at George Mason University.
Her publications include Books for Children, Books for Adults: Age and the
Novel from Defoe to James (Cambridge, 2014) and “‘Experiments Before
Breakfast’: Toys, Education, and Middle-Class Childhood” in Dennis
Denisoff (Ed.) The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture
(Ashgate, 2008). She studies the history of children’s literature, repre-
sentations of disability, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century British
novels. Her work has appeared in journals such as Eighteenth-­Century
Studies, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Disability Studies
Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and NOVEL: A Forum on
Fiction.
Sebastian Mitchell is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the
University of Birmingham, UK. He has written widely on literature and
art in the eighteenth century. His book Visions of Britain, 1730–1830:
Anglo-Scottish Writing and Representation (2013) was shortlisted for the
Saltire Society Research Book of the Year. He has recently guest edited a
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

special issue on Ossian for the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. His
study Utopia and Its Discontents will be published by Bloomsbury Press in
2019.
Anja Müller is a Full Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies
at the University of Siegen, where she is a co-chair of the faculty’s research
group on European Children’s Literature (EKJL). Her research interests
range from eighteenth-century literature and culture to contemporary
drama, fantasy, intertextuality and adaptation, (historical) childhood stud-
ies, and children’s literature. Her publications in the latter fields include
Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century: Age and Identity (ed.,
Ashgate, 2006), Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English
Periodicals and Prints, 1689–1789 (Ashgate, 2009, ChLA Honor Book),
Childhood in the English Renaissance (ed., Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier,
2013), Adapting Canonical Texts in Children’s Literature (ed., Bloomsbury
2013), and Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children’s
Literature (ed., with Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Routledge, 2016).
Together with Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz, she is
co-editing the book series Studies in European Children’s Literature
(Heidelberg: Winter).
Cheryl Nixon is a Professor of English and an Associate Provost at the
University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research focuses on literary rep-
resentations and legal restructurings of the family; her current project con-
nects the development of family law to the eighteenth-century rise of the
domestic novel. Her recent books include The Orphan in Eighteenth-­
Century Law and Literature: Estate, Blood, and Body and Novel Definitions:
An Anthology of Commentary on the Novel, 1688–1815. These works and
her articles feature archival research that interweaves print and man-
uscript literary and legal materials. In an attempt to make archival
research and the early novel accessible to a broader public, she has
worked with students to create rare books exhibitions for the Boston
Public Library, including “Crooks, Rogues, and Maids Less than
Virtuous: Books in the Streets of 18th-Century London” and “The
Imaginative Worlds of Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and
the Early Novel.”
Andrew O’Malley is Associate Professor of English at Ryerson University
in Toronto. He is the author of The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s
Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century (Routledge, 2003)
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

and of Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe

(Palgrave, 2012).
Lissa Paul is a Professor at Brock University in St. Catharines Ontario,
Canada, an Associate General Editor of The Norton Anthology of Children’s
Literature (2005), and a co-editor of Keywords for Children’s Literature
(2011). The Children’s Book Business: Lessons from the Long Eighteenth
Century, her first book on Eliza Fenwick, was published in 2011. Her
new biography, Eliza Fenwick (1766–1840): A Life Rewritten, will be
published by the University of Delaware Press in January 2019, in
their Early Modern Feminisms Series. Lissa’s research is generously
funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
of Canada.
Ann Wierda Rowland is an Associate Professor of English at the
University of Kansas. She is the author of Romanticism and Childhood:
The Infantilization of British Literary Culture (Cambridge University
Press, 2012) and the co-editor, with Paul Westover, of Transatlantic
Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave, 2016).
She has also published articles on John Keats, William Wordsworth, Walter
Scott, the Romantic ballad revival, the Romantic novel, and sentimental
fiction.
Donelle Ruwe is the author of British Children’s Poetry in the Romantic
Era: Verse, Riddle, and Rhyme (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and the editor
of a collection of essays, Culturing the Child 1660–1830: Essays in Memory
of Mitzi Myers (Scarecrow, 2005), and the forthcoming Children,
Childhood, and Musical Theater. She has published numerous scholarly
articles on Romantic poetics, women writers, and children’s writing
in Eighteenth-Century Life, Writing Women, Children’s Literature,
Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and others. Ruwe is the co-president of
the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Women Writers
Association and has been the chair of the Scholarly Edited Collection
award for the Children’s Literature Association. She has received
research awards including a National Humanities Center Summer
Program Fellowship, the RMMLA Faculty Travel Award, the Fleur
Cowles Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Research Center, and an
Ahmanson Fellowship from UCLA. Ruwe is a published poet, and her
chapbook Condiments won the Kinloch Rivers Award in 1999, and her
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

chapbook Another Message You Miss the Point Of won the Camber Press
Prize in 2006.
Jennifer Thorn is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the
Interdisciplinary Minor in Gender Studies at Saint Anselm College
(New Hampshire). She works in the transatlantic eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, with a special focus on the history of childhood,
class, and race, and is the author of many book chapters and articles
on early American and eighteenth-century British texts. The editor of
the collection Writing British Infanticide: Child-Murder, Gender, and
Print, 1722–1859 (2003), she is at work on a book, Black Children,
Slavery, and Piety in Early New England, which focuses in part on Phillis
Wheatley, about whose life and writings she has published four articles.
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 List of Figures

Fig. 9.1 ‘Triple Time’ from Charles Dibdin’s Music Epitomized, 8th
edition. (Courtesy of Toronto Public Library, Osborne
Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto, Canada) 169
Fig. 9.2 ‘The length of notes as they grow out of each other’ from
Charles Dibdin’s Music Epitomized, 8th edition. (Courtesy of
Toronto Public Library, Osborne Collection of Early
Children’s Books, Toronto, Canada) 170
Fig. 9.3 Plate from Logier’s First Companion to the Royal Patent
Chiroplast, printed with permission of the Harry Ransom
Center, University of Texas Austin 172
Fig. 12.1 Charles Howard Hodges after Richard Morton Paye,
Children Spouting Tragedy, 1785, mezzotint,
45.4 × 55.5 cm. (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library,
Yale University) 232
Fig. 12.2 John Dean after Sir Joshua Reynolds, Cupid in the Character
of a Link Boy, 1777, mezzotint, 38.9 × 27.4 cm. (Yale Center
for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund) 235
Fig. 12.3 John Dean after Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mercury, 1777,
mezzotint, 39 × 27.4 cm. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul
Mellon Fund) 236
Fig. 12.4 Thomas Rowlandson, Political Affection, 1784, etching,
24.5 × 35 cm. (General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Yale University) 239
Fig. 12.5 James Gillray, Lady Termagant Flaybum Going to Give her
Step Son a Taste of her Desert after Dinner […], 1786,
hand-coloured etching and stipple engraving, 43 × 54 cm.
(Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University) 240

xvii
xviii List of Figures

Fig. 12.6 James Gillray, John Bull’s Progress, 1793, hand-coloured

etching, 31 × 38 cm. (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole
Library, Yale University) 242
Fig. 12.7 James Gillray, A Block for the Wigs; or, the New State
Whirligig, 1783, etching, 25 × 34 cm. (Yale Center for
British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 243
Fig. 12.8 Thomas Rowlandson, The Devils Darling, 1814, hand-­
coloured etching, 34 × 24 cm. (Image courtesy of Bonhams) 245
Fig. 12.9 William Hogarth, Gin Lane, 1751, engraving and etching,
38.9 × 32.1 cm. (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library,
Yale University) 249
Fig. 12.10 William Hogarth, A Harlot’s Progress, Plate 6, 1732, etching
and engraving, 31.6 × 39 cm. (Courtesy of the Lewis
Walpole Library, Yale University) 250
Fig. 12.11 William Hogarth, First Stage of Cruelty, The Four Stages of
Cruelty, 1751, etching and engraving, 38.7 × 32.4 cm. (Yale
Center for British Art, Gift of Patricia Cornwall) 252
Fig. 12.12 Bernard Baron after William Hogarth, Evening, The Four
Times of Day, 1738, etching and engraving, 45.4 × 37.5 cm.
(Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 254
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Eighteenth-Century
Childhoods and Literary Cultures

Andrew O’Malley

The eighteenth century has long been regarded as a watershed period in

the history of both childhood and children’s literature. It saw the rapid
growth of a specialized text industry addressing young readers,1 and at the
same time, the child became increasingly visible and important in a range
of ‘adult’ discourses. Philippe Ariès’s now more than a half-century-old
assertion that the child, as differentiated subject with its own needs and
material culture, did not exist in Europe before the seventeenth century
has rightly and usefully been critiqued,2 as has J. H. Plumb’s famous cel-
ebration of a ‘new world of children’ in the eighteenth century.3 Yet the
fact remains that, certainly and most notably within the more privileged
segments of English society, experiences of childhood for many changed
significantly in the period this volume considers, as did the ways in—and
extent to—which the child circulated within literary culture.
There has been considerable scholarship, including new research
to appear in the other volumes of the Literary Cultures and Childhoods
series, demonstrating that the generations before the period considered
here produced or adapted texts for the use of child readers. Likewise, ‘the
child’ had already accrued a variety of cultural meanings in the literary

A. O’Malley (*)
Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 1

A. O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century
Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94737-2_1
2 A. O’MALLEY

imagination. One significant change in the long eighteenth century, how-

ever, is the ubiquity of childhood both in terms of the print materials
marketed to people at this stage of life and in terms of the discourses in
which it becomes an important consideration and significant trope. Both
cases owe a great deal, of course, to changing demographics in Britain
during the period, which saw considerable growth in the number of young
people, and to economic growth that helped increase literacy rates and
spurred a rapidly expanding text industry that quickly identified the
opportunities afforded by the greater numbers of parents with disposable
income.4 Added in this period to the existing juvenile corpus of ­hornbooks,
battledores, chapbooks, devotional texts, fables, and conduct books was a
remarkable range of reading material designed and marketed specifically
for children: long-form fiction modelled on the novel for adult readers;
periodicals; dramas for home theatricals; books of verse (particularly by
the end of the century); and non-fiction works covering such subjects as
the natural sciences, technological innovations, local and world geography
and history, mathematics, and biography.
As children increasingly became subjects for whom adults wrote, they
similarly became subjects about whom adults wrote with greater fre-
quency. Pedagogical treatises and systems proliferated in the period,
penned by some of the key luminaries of the age, most famously John
Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.5 Medical experts devoted greater
attention to repairing and sustaining the health of young people, produc-
ing treatises for fellow practitioners, along with advice books for parents
anxious to safeguard the immediate and future well-being of their off-
spring.6 The legal status of the child likewise became a matter of greater
concern, and this interest manifested itself in novels and plays centring on
issues of inheritance and apprenticeship, as Cheryl Nixon’s chapter in this
volume discusses. As Susan Manly and Sebastian Mitchell demonstrate in
their chapters, childhood also became a powerful trope that could be
mobilized for different political agendas, while Ann Wierda Rowland, also
a contributor to this volume, has shown elsewhere the extent to which
theorizing about the child extended into theories of poetics and
language.7
When we speak of changes in the realm of childhood, in the eighteenth
century or in any other period, it is worth keeping in mind, as Adrienne
Gavin notes, that these are never adopted uniformly or universally; it is a
mistake to assume ‘each new – or seemingly new – construction of child-
hood neatly and irrevocably replaces its predecessor.’8 Likewise, such
 INTRODUCTION: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHILDHOODS AND LITERARY… 3

changes are rarely as unequivocally positive as is sometimes suggested by

the accounts of children’s ‘progress’ common to later twentieth-century
histories on the subject.9 Taking into account a variety of literary and print
forms—novels, poetry, legal writing, periodicals, pamphlets, personal let-
ters, graphic prints, along with the literature produced specifically for
young readers—the authors of this volume explore the complex and some-
times paradoxical ways in which childhood was approached and repre-
sented in the period. To account for this complexity, this volume looks at
eighteenth-century childhoods from a variety of angles: as a set of expecta-
tions, desires, concerns, limitations, and capacities adults sought to address
in their writing for young people; as a trope or symbol that performed a
range of cultural work in the writings adults produced for adult readers; as
a lived, embodied experience children recorded and actively shaped. Then
as now, the meanings of childhood were not always stable, and the bound-
aries—such as age—used to demarcate it were at times fluid, as Teresa
Michals’s chapter here demonstrates. Childhood tended, as it still tends,
to be invoked with purpose and its definition relies on the contexts in
which it is being addressed. One of the fundamental contradictions of
childhood within our culture illustrates this instability, and it is a contra-
diction that begins to take shape in the eighteenth century: that the child
embodies, sometimes simultaneously, the promise of futurity as well as an
ideal of, and longing for, a lost past. Childhood became a category equally
suited to Enlightenment ideas of progress and improvement and to the
sentimental and nostalgic ideas associated with what has come to be
known as the ‘Romantic child.’
The study of historical children’s literature and childhood has not
always co-habited easily with the modern field of ‘child studies.’ Peter
Hunt famously and controversially insisted that current children’s litera-
ture scholarship should keep to works produced for children who are
‘recognizably’ like today’s children.10 At the same time, as Matthew
Grenby recounts, bibliographers such as Brian Alderson, with deep invest-
ments in the historical particulars of children’s book publishing, have
expressed frustration over recent trends in children’s literature criticism,
‘especially any criticism based on literary theory.’11 This volume attempts
to attend to the demands of rigorous historical analysis while remaining
wholly aware of the theoretical concerns child studies as a discipline has
raised over the problems of child-adult relations and of the constructed-
ness of ‘childhood’ as a category. The essays here also acknowledge and
build on recent methodological developments specific to the field of
4 A. O’MALLEY

e­ ighteenth-century children’s literature and culture, such as: the ideo-

logical readings of children’s texts pioneered by Isaac Kramnick and Alan
Richardson; the feminist recuperations and reassessments Mitzi Myers
helped initiate; and more recently reader-focused investigations of the
sort pursued by Matthew Grenby.12
The thirteen chapters contained in this collection are arranged into
three sections that correspond to some of the key aspects of child studies
this introduction has tried to identify: definitions and experiences of child-
hood; children’s reading and pedagogy; and representations of childhood
in adult discourse. Several offer fresh insights into texts and authors with
considerable existing criticism: Jessica Evans’s look at pedagogy in Ann
Radcliffe, or Richard De Ritter’s treatment of wonder in Arnaud Berquin,
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and others. They also bring to light now-obscure
aspects of the period’s print culture, as in the case of Donelle Ruwe’s
investigation into debates around the use of the ‘chiroplast’ in musical
training. Some, such as Anja Müller’s recasting of child-adult power
dynamics, bring new theoretical approaches to the field, while others, spe-
cifically Adriana Benzaquén’s study of children’s letter-writing, inform us
about how young people in the period understood themselves within the
system of family relations. Although the focus of this volume is very much
on texts and discourses for and about childhood in the British context
(more so than I had originally hoped would be the case), two of the essays
here reach beyond England, to look at questions of race and childhood in
the American context (Jennifer Thorn), and at British ex-patriot Eliza
Fenwick’s efforts to forge a transatlantic pedagogy (Lissa Paul).
For a volume that concerns itself with English-language literary cul-
tures, such a concentration on Britain is to be expected. There is, however,
a growing body of scholarship on American childhoods and children’s
literature in the eighteenth century.13 As well, childhoods in the Irish and
Scottish, as well as the English provincial and labouring-class, contexts are
certainly deserving of greater consideration; this proved regrettably not
possible in this volume. Finally, while Jennifer Thorn’s essay makes an
important contribution to scholarship on African-American childhood,
much more remains to be investigated in this area, as well as in colonial
and Indigenous childhoods.
Section I, ‘Status and Contexts of Childhood,’ gathers essays that situ-
ate childhood socially in the eighteenth century and explore its defini-
tional contours. In ‘Age, Status, and Reading in the Eighteenth Century,’
Teresa Michals offers a careful reading of the period’s most influential text
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you of the tortures which your mind must suffer, nor the result of
such torture when at last you develop the plate in the dark-room—
both are too painful to speak about. Now, a woman knows nothing
about this two-thousandth part of a second. She would not believe
there were such a measurable fraction of time if you told her. She
just exposes the plate; that is all.
One day I had to get a photograph taken in a hurry. I marched
into a photographer’s in the Strand. There was first a narrow
passage, hung with frames filled with photos of young men and
young women looking their worst in their best. Then I was
confronted by a flight of stairs which I mounted, to find myself in a
great big room hung also with photographs—photographs of family
groups, of babies in their characteristic attitudes as their mothers
had given them to the world. Every conceivable sort of photograph
was there, but the room, except for an American roll-topped desk
near the window, was empty.
I coughed, and the head of a young girl—not more than twenty
years of age—popped up above the desk.
“Can Mr. Robinson take my photograph this morning?” I asked.
“Mr. Robinson is not in at present,” she replied.
“I rather wanted my photograph taken in a hurry,” said I.
“Oh, you can have it taken,” said she. “Would you like it done at
once?”
“At once, if you please,” I answered.
She rose from her seat behind the roll-topped desk and she
walked to the door.
“Then will you step into the waiting-room?” she asked.
I obeyed. The waiting-room had a mirror and a pair of brushes.
When I thought of the families whose portraits I had seen within—I
refrained.
“I shall do,” said I, “as I am.”
After a few moments’ delay there was a knock on the door. I
opened it. There again was the little lady waiting for me.
 “Will you step up to the studio, please?” she said, and I received
the impression from her voice of anxious assistants waiting in rows
to receive me, ready to take my features and record them upon a
photographic plate for the benefit of posterity.
Up into the studio, then, I went; a gaunt, great place with white-
blinded windows that stared up to the dull, grey sky. But it was
empty. I looked in vain for the assistants—there were none. And
when she began to wheel the camera into place I stood amazed.
“Are you the whole business of Robinson and Co.?” I asked.
She smiled encouragingly.
“Mr. Robinson is out,” said she.
“I don’t believe there is a Mr. Robinson,” I replied.
She laughed gleefully at that and repeated that there was such a
person, but he was out.
“And does he leave you to the responsibility of the entire
premises?” I asked.
“Yes,” said she.
“What do you do if any one comes into the portrait gallery
downstairs while you’re up here?”
“Oh, that’s all right,” she replied confidently; “they don’t often
come.”
I let her fix that abominable instrument of torture at the back of
my neck. Her fingers tickled me as she did it, but I said nothing. I
was trying in my mind to assess the value of this business of Mr.
Robinson. It was no easy job. I had not got beyond single figures
when she walked back to the camera.
I glanced up at the leaden sky.
“It’s rather dull,” said I; “what exposure are you going to give?”
“Oh, I think once will be enough.”
“Once what?” I asked.
“Just once,” said she.
 “But, good heavens!” I exclaimed, and I thought of the two-
thousandth part of a second—“it must be one of something. Is it
seconds or minutes or half-hours or what?”
She burst out laughing.
“I don’t know what it is,” she replied, as if it were the simplest
matter in the world, “only Mr. Robinson says my once is as good as
his twice.”
“Is it?” said I. “As good as his twice? What a splendid once it
must be!”
Now that is what I mean. That is the feminine appreciation of
mathematics. I wish I had it. It may not be of much service on the
office stool, but in a world of men and women it is invaluable.
 XIII
THE MATERNAL INSTINCT
 XIII
THE MATERNAL INSTINCT

Some things there are which you may count upon for ever. The
fittest will always survive, despite the million charities to aid the
incompetent; the maternal instinct will always be the deepest human
incentive, no matter who may gibe at the sentiment which clings
about little children.
Now, if it be true that Art is the voice of the Age in which we live;
that the painter paints what the eye of the Age has seen, the singer
sings the songs which the Age has heard, the man of letters writes
the thoughts which have passed through the mind of the Age—if all
this is true, then how strange and unreal an Age this must be.
For if for one moment you chose to consider it, there are but few
painters, few singers, few writers who express the immutable laws
of life. Among writers most of all, perhaps, this is an age which
devotes itself to the unfittest. The physically unfit, the morally unfit,
the socially unfit—these are the characters which fill the pages of
those who write to-day.
The old hero, the man of great strength, of great honour, of
great courage, he no longer exists in literature. I am told he is old-
fashioned, a copy-book individual, a puppet set in motion with no
subtle movements of character, but with wires too plainly seen,
worked by a hand too obviously visible. There is no Art in him, I am
told. I am glad there is not. He would lose all the qualities of
heroship for me if there were.
In times gone by, though, this old-fashioned hero was just as real
a man as is the hero of to-day. In times gone by this hero was not
unnatural, not wanting in character or humanity when he slept with
the maid of his choice, a naked sword between them guarding the
pricelessness of her virginity. But now—to-day—how wanting in
character do you imagine would he be thought for such a deed as
that? How painfully unreal?
Is this the fault of the Age? Or is it the fault of the writer? Is it
that the Age cannot produce a real hero? Or is it that he is there in
numbers in the midst of us and the man of letters has not the
clearness of vision to see him? For it is not the fittest, but the
unfittest who survives in the pages of literature now.
And thus it is also when you find treatment in fiction of that
immutable law, the maternal instinct. If in the novel of to-day you
meet the character of a woman with a child, you may be fairly
confident that it will be shown to you sooner or later in the ensuing
pages how easily she will desert it for the love of some man other
than her husband, or how, loving that man, her soul will be wracked
ere she bids it farewell. But, tortured or not, she will go. No matter
how skilfully she is shown to repent of it later, still she will go.
Now, is that the fault of the Age, or is it the fault of the writer? In
danger or in love, do women desert their children? It may happen
that they do, but that is a very different matter. All that glitters is not
gold—all that happens is not real. Yet it seems to be the choice of
the modern writer to seize upon these isolated happenings, give
them a coating of reality, and offer them to the public as life.
But life is not a narrow business where things just happen and
that is all. Life is the length and breadth of this great universe where
things are, in relation to the whole system of suns and moons and
stars. Now the maternal instinct is a law without which this
wonderfully regulated system would shatter and crumble into a
thousand little pieces.
But no one extols it in this age of ours. Talk of it and you are
dubbed a sentimentalist at once. Write of it and the cheap irony of
critics is heaped upon you. Yet there seems no greater and no
grander struggle to me than when these inevitable laws march
through the invading army of vermin and of parasites to their
inevitable end of victory.
 The other day I witnessed a most thrilling spectacle: a mother
defending her child from death—a duel where the odds against
victory were legion.
In the hedge that shields my garden from the road there is a
thrush’s nest. I saw her build it. She was very doubtful about me at
first; played all sorts of tricks to deceive me; decoyed my attention
away while her mate was a-building; sent him to distract my mind
while she was putting those finishing touches to the house of which
only a woman knows the secret—and knows it so well.
I think before it was completed she had lost much of her distrust
in me, for I did nothing to disturb her. It was not in my mind to see
what she would do if things happened. I just wanted everything to
be—that was all. And so, after a time, she would hop about the lawn
where I was sitting, taking me silently thereby into her confidence,
making me feel that I was not such an outcast of Nature as she had
supposed me to be at first.
I tried to live up to that as well as I could. Whenever I passed
the nest and saw her uplifted beak, her two watchful eyes gazing
alert over the rim of it, I assumed ignorance at the expense of her
thinking what an unobservant fool I must be. But there were always
moments when she was away from home and I, stealing to the nest,
found opportunity for discovering how things were going on. Five
fine blue eggs were laid at last. I think she must have guessed that I
counted them, for one morning she caught me with my hand in the
nest. I slunk away feeling a sorry sort of fool for my clumsy
interference. She flew at once to see what I had done. I guess the
terror that must have filled her heart. But when she had counted
them herself and found her house in order, she came out on to the
lawn and looked at me as though I were one of those strange
enigmas which life sometimes offers to every one of us.
At length one day, when I called and gently put in my hand—
leaving my card, as you might say—the eggs were there no longer.
In place of them was a soft, warm mass like a heap of swan’s-down,
palpitating with life.
 I met her later on the lawn, when she perked her head up at me
and as good as said:
“I suppose you know I’ve got other things to do now, besides
looking beautiful.”
But I thought she looked splendid. What is more, I told her so,
and it seemed just for the moment as if she understood, as if there
came back into her eyes that look of grateful vanity which she wore
last spring when her mate was wooing her with his songs from the
elm tree across the way. But the next moment she had put all
flattery behind her and was haggling with a worm, not as to price no
doubt, but haggling nevertheless for possession.
Well, the household went on splendidly, until one day I saw my
cat sitting on the path below the nest staring up into the bushes.
“You little devil!” I shouted, and she went galloping down the
garden with a stone trundling at her heels.
I kept a closer watch after that and, one morning, hearing a
great noise as of the songs of many birds while I was at my
breakfast, I just stepped out to see what was happening.
I was held spellbound by what I saw. For there, on the path
again below the nest, sat the cat and two yards from her—scarcely
more—stood my little mother-thrush, her eyes dilated with terror,
her feathers ruffled and swelling on her throat, singing—singing—
singing, as though her heart would burst.
It can only last a moment, I thought. One spring and the cat will
have her. But, no! Before the greatness of that courage, before the
glory of that song, the cat was silenced and made impotent to move.
There, within a few feet of her was her prey. With one swift rush,
with one fell stroke of her velvet paw, she could have laid it low. But
she was up against a law greater than that which nerves the hunter
to his cunning.
For five minutes, with throat swelling and eyes like little pins of
fire, the mother sang her song of fearless maternity. The glorious
notes rang from her in ceaseless trills and tireless cadences. I have
heard a singer at Covent Garden, when the whole house rose as one
person and applauded her to the very roof, but never have I heard
such a song as this, which put to silence the very laws of God that
His greatest law might triumph.
For five minutes she sang and then, with crouching steps, the cat
turned tail and crawled away into the garden. The thrush ceased her
singing and fluttered exhausted up to the nest.
And they write of women deserting their children!
 XIV
FROM MY PORTFOLIO
 XIV
FROM MY PORTFOLIO

He has just reached his eightieth year. Eighty times—not conscious

perhaps of them all—he has seen the wall-flowers blossom in his old
garden; well-nigh eighty times has he thinned out his lettuces and
his spring onions, pruned his few rose trees, weeded his gravel
paths.
Now he is bent with rheumatism; his rounded back and stooping
head, his tremulous knees in their old corduroy breeches, are but
sorry promises of what he was. Yet with what I have been told and
what I can easily imagine, it is plainly that I can see the fine stalwart
fellow he has been. Until the age of seventy-two he was the carrier
for our village. How many journeys he made, fair weather or foul,
always up to the stroke of time, never forgetting the message for
this person, the purchase for that, they will all tell you here in the
village. I know nothing of his life as a carrier. It is of an old man I
give you my picture—an old man awaiting the coming of death with
a clear eye and a sturdy heart, enjoying the last moments of life
while he may, and facing those sorrows and deprivations which
come with old age in a way that many a younger man might learn
and profit from.
Only a short time since, his wife departed upon her last journey.
The winter came and snatched her from him just as the first frost
nips the last of the autumn flowers. Her frail white petals drooped
and then they fell. He was left to press them between the leaves of
that book of Life which, with trembling fingers, he still clutched
within his hand.
He was too ill to follow her body to its quiet little bed in that
corner of God’s acre where it was made; but I can feel the loneliness
in the heart of him when he turned and turned with wakeful eyes
that night, stretching out his knotted fingers to the empty place
beside him—the place in that bed which had been hers for so many
happy years and was hers no longer.
They thought he would never pull through that winter after his
loss; and indeed he must have fought manfully with that undaunted
courage of a man who clings to life, no matter what misfortune,
because it is his right—his heritage. For imagine the long, sleepless
nights which must have followed the departure of his gentle bed-
fellow! Think of those weary, endless silences which once had been
filled by the whisperings of their voices! For in bed and at night-time,
the old people always whisper. It is as though they were deeply
conscious of the invisible presence of God and His angels. They talk
in hushed voices as though they were in church.
I can hear her saying—
“John.”
“Yes,” I can hear him reply.
“Are you awake?”
“Yes—are you?”
“I am. Isn’t it a windy night?”
“’Tis a fine storm—and I never put in they pea-sticks. I was
going to do ’en to-morrow.”
And then I can hear her little whisper of consolation—
“Maybe they’ll be safe till then. They’re sturdy plants.” At which I
can see him turning over in his bed and passing into one of those
short hours of sleep into which Nature so gently divides the night for
the old people.
Then think of the long and weary silences through which he must
have endured before he grew accustomed to the absence of his bed-
fellow. For there seem to me few things more pathetic yet more
beautiful than two old people who have long passed the passions of
youth, sharing their bed together, with the simplicity and innocence
of little children. I can, too, so readily conceive how dread the terror
of the night becomes when one of them is taken and the other left. I
can hear the sounds at night that frighten, the storms that rattle the
tiles on the old roof making the one who is left behind stretch out
his groping hand for the trembling touch of another hand in vain.
Yet through all this he survived. Cruelly though his heart had
been dealt with, he still retained the whole spirit of courage in his
soul. With all its chill winds and bitter frosts, he braved out that
winter and two years have passed now since his wife died.
I see him nearly every day in his garden, walking up and down
the paths, picking out a weed here, a weed there. Two walking-
sticks he has to help him on his journeys. They are called simply,
number one and number two. And when it is a fine morning, with
the sun riding fiercely in a cloudless sky, his daughter will say to him
—
“You need only take number one to-day.”
So he takes number one and a look comes into those child’s eyes
of his as though he would say—
“Ah—you see I’m not done for yet. There’s many an old fellow of
eighty can’t get along without two sticks to help him.”
One day, too, this summer, I found him working with a bill-hook
in his garden. The grass had grown up high under the quick-set
hedge on one of the paths. He was clearing it all away.
“Must keep the little place tidy, sir,” he said, with a bright twinkle
in his eye. “They grasses do grow up so quick there’d be no seeing
the path at all.” Then with little suppressed grunts of his breath to
every swing of the bill-hook, he went on steadily with his work,
leaning heavily upon number one with the other hand.
Rather strenuous labour you would think for an old man of eighty
to be doing. But as he worked, I saw that all the stems of the grass
had been cut for him beforehand with a scythe. He was only
sweeping it together into heaps with the aid of a bill-hook. So long
as it was a bill-hook it seemed man’s labour to him.
I try sometimes to find out what he thinks about life and its
swiftly approaching end. But he is very reticent to speak of it—so
unlike our little serving-maid, who takes her evenings out alone, and
when I asked her why she did not prefer company, replied—
“I like to think, sir.”
“What of?” said I.
“Of life and the night,” said she.
But if he thinks of life and the night, as indeed I am sure he
must, he tells his thoughts to no one. It was only once, when I was
praising the scent and the show of his glorious wall-flowers, that he
said to me—
“I like to think they’re the best this year that I’ve ever had. I
grow them all from our own seed, sir. I save it up myself every year.
And I like to think this year that they’re the very best, because you
know, sir, I may not see them again.”
I tried to imagine what would be the state of my own mind, if I
thought I should never see wall-flowers again. I wondered could I
say it with such courage, such resignation as he.
To never see wall-flowers again! It seems in a nonsensical,
childish way to me to sum up the whole tragedy—if tragedy there
really be—in Death. It seems, moreover, to give just that little stroke
of the brush, that little line of the pen in completion of this thumb-
nail portrait of mine. An old man in an old garden that he loves,
telling himself that his wall-flowers are the best that year of all—
telling himself bravely night after night when he goes to bed,
morning after morning when he rises to the new day—which is one
more day nearer the end—telling himself that they are the best this
year of all, because he may not see them any more.
To never see wall-flowers again!
 XV
AN OLD STRING BONNET
 XV
AN OLD STRING BONNET

I care not what it is, so long as it be old; but if an object has passed
through other hands than mine, it gathers an indefinable charm
about it. Old china, old cups and saucers, whether they be ugly or
beautiful, are priceless by reason of that faint murmuring of other
lives which clings around them. In the mere tinkling of the china as
it is brought in upon the tray, I can hear a thousand conversations
and gossipings coming dimly to my ears out of the wealth of years
which is heaped upon them.
For this reason would I always use the old china which it is my
good fortune to possess. A breakfast-table, a tea-table spread with
china which can tell you nothing than that it has but lately come
from the grimy potteries, makes poor company to sit down with. Yet
let it be but Spode, or Worcester, or Lowestoft, and every silence
that falls upon you is filled with the whisperings of these priceless
companions.
I have no sympathy with the collector who locks his china away
because it is rare and worth so much in pounds and shillings and
pence. He is no more than a gaoler, incarcerating in an eternal
prison the very best friends he has, and just, if you please, because
they are his.
What if there is the risk of their being broken! A rivet here, a
rivet there will make them speak again. I have a Spode milk-jug with
forty-five rivets in it and it is more eloquent to me than all the
modern china you could find, however perfect it may be. In fact, I
would sooner have a piece that has been mended. It shows that in
those long-ago days, where all romance lies hiding for us now, it
shows that they cared for their treasures and would not let them be
discarded because they happened upon evil times. I have also an old
blue and white tea-pot with a silver spout. A dealer sniffed at it the
other day.
“May have been good once,” said he.
“’Tis better now,” said I. “So would you and I be if we’d been
through the wars.”
“Do you mean to say you’d prefer me with a wooden arm?” he
asked.
“I would,” said I. “You’d be a better man. You couldn’t grasp so
much.”
But the other day I found a treasure. Miss B——, the old spinster
lady in whose farm I have my little dwelling, is by way of being the
reincarnation of a jackdaw. She has cupboards and chests in every
room in which lie hidden a thousand old things which have been in
her family for years. Yesterday, in turning out an old drawer, I came
across a quaint little contrivance that looked like a string bag, only it
was beautifully made in three parts, all composed of a wonderful
lace-work of fine string and knitted together, each one by a delicate
stitching of white horsehair.
I brought it out into the kitchen, tenderly in my hand.
“Whatever is this?” I asked.
She took it in her fingers and looked at it for a moment, then,
inconsequently, she laid it down upon the kitchen table.
“That—” said she, “that was my great, great grandmother’s
bonnet. She wore it up till the time she died.”
“Why, it’s nearly two hundred years old!” I exclaimed.
“If it’s a day,” said she.
I gazed at it for some moments. Then suddenly it seemed to
move, to raise itself from the table. Another instant and it was
spread out, decked with a tiny piece of pink ribbon, on the head of
an old lady—but oh, so old! Her silvery white hair thrust out in little
curls and coils through the mesh of the string, and there she was,
with a great broad skirt and big puff sleeves bobbing me a curtsey
before my very eyes.
 I turned to Miss B——
“Do you see?” I asked.
“See what?” said she.
“Your great, great grandmother.”
“I never saw her in my life,” she replied.
“But under the string bonnet!” I exclaimed.
“Goodness! That ’ud fall to pieces if any one tried to put it on
now. It’s no good to me. You can have it if you like.”
Then I understood why she could not see her great, great
grandmother, and, with a feeling of compassion for her loneliness, I
took the old lady into my arms. Miss B—— went to the sink to peel
some potatoes.
“You’re perfectly beautiful,” I whispered, and her old face
wrinkled all over with smiles.
“They used to tell me that when I was a girl,” said she.
“You’re more beautiful now,” said I.
“What’s that you’re saying?” asked Miss B—— over her shoulder.
“What I should have said,” said I, “if I’d lived two hundred years
ago.”
 XVI
THE NEW MALADY
 XVI
THE NEW MALADY

In every age there is a new disease—there is a new malady—a

strange sickness. The whole army of medical science goes out to
meet it and there is pitched a battle wherein lives are sacrificed,
honour made and lost. But in the end the glorious banner of medical
skill is generally carried triumphant from the field. Some old foes
truly there are who are not conquered yet, with whom a guerilla
warfare is continuously being waged. Never can they be brought into
the open field; never can they be come upon at close quarters.
Sometimes in a skirmish they are routed and put to flight; yet ever
they return, lessened in numbers, no doubt, weakened in strength,
but still a marauding enemy to mankind.
Then apart from these, there is that new malady, which, with its
stern inevitability, the age always brings amidst its retinue of
civilisation.
It would seem, notwithstanding the dictum of the Bab Ballad-
maker, that they are not always blessings which follow in
Civilisation’s train. One disease after another has come amongst us
from out the ranks of civilisation. And now appears the latest of all,
seizing upon its victims under the very walls of that fortress of
medical science.
It is the disease of bearing children, the disease of making life.
We all know how science with its anæsthetics, with its deftly
made instruments and its consummate skill, is attacking the enemy
from every quarter. Yet the fatality of the sickness is steadily
growing. More women die in childbirth now than ever fell its victims
in the days when the services of a common mid-wife were all that
were at their disposal.
 It is terrible sometimes to think how rapidly this most natural of
all functions—since upon it hangs the existence of all people in the
world—it is terrible to think how rapidly it is shaping into the
awesome features of a disease. Women are as ashamed of its
conditions now as they would be if smallpox had pitted their delicate
skins. They speak of it as of some dreadful operation—which indeed
it has become—and, instead of glorying over a possession which
they alone command, they will talk of it as a curse which, suffering
alone, they should be given compensation for. They ask for the vote!
Great God! As if the vote could compensate them for the loss of
bearing children as the God of nature meant they should be borne!
As if any form of compensation could ease such a loss as that!
Success and civilisation—these are the two subtle poisons from
the effects of which we are all suffering. Nothing fails like success!
Nothing degrades so much as civilisation!
A little while ago a woman who had given birth to a fine child
told me quite frankly that she herself was not going to feed it.
“Do you mean suckle it?” said I.
She did not like that word and she shuddered.
“You object to the use of the word?” I suggested.
“Is it quite nice?” she asked.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Words are only ugly,” said I, “when they express ugly deeds. I
can understand if you find the deed ugly you don’t like the word.”
She answered that she did not mind the thing itself. “You see,”
said she, “it’s quite impossible for me to do it. We’ve been asked up
—my husband and I—to Chatsworth to meet the King, and it would
be foolish to lose such an opportunity—wouldn’t it? I can’t go up like
this, so I must have a sort of operation.”
“So you’ve made up your mind?” said I.
She screwed up her eyes as her conscience faltered in her
breast.
“Practically,” she replied.
 “Well, if not quite,” I suggested, “write to the King, and ask him
whether he would sooner meet you at Chatsworth or have a stalwart
son given to the country.”
She told me I made the most absurd remarks she had ever heard
from any one and she walked away. “Besides,” said she, over her
shoulder, “it’s a daughter.”
I found her name amongst those invited to Chatsworth to meet
the King. I saw her picture in a photograph of the Chatsworth group
and she looked beautiful. Her figure was that of a child who had
never known maternity.
There are traitors even in the camp of medical science, thought
I. Nothing degrades science so much as the march of civilisation—no
social woman fails so utterly as when she succeeds in meeting the
King.
I have a friend, in the tiny chintz parlour of whose cottage in the
country a certain collection of prints adorn the walls. For the most
part they are steel engravings, valuable enough in their way. But it is
the subject common to them all, rather than the intrinsic value of
each picture, which has persuaded my friend to their collection. One
and all, with the tenderest treatment you can imagine, they portray
a baby feeding at the gentle breast of its mother. No other pictures
in the room are there but these, and there must at least be a fair
dozen of them. You cannot fail but notice them. The similarity of
their subject alone would force itself upon your mind.
Yet, would you believe it, the ladies who come there to call upon
my friend’s wife, regard them with horror and alarm. As their eyes
fall upon them, they turn sharply away, only to be met with yet
another of those improper pictures upon an opposite wall. With far
greater equanimity and even interest would they look upon a series
of Hogarth’s prints. The vicar of the parish, too, was alarmed. He
asked my friend whether he did not think that such pictures did
harm.
“Of course I know,” said he, “it is a natural function and is all
right in its proper place. I don’t mean to say that it would do harm
to you or to me, of course—we’re old enough to discriminate. But
younger people are apt to look at these things in a different light.”
“Do you know that as a fact?” asked my friend quietly.
Now, the vicar was a truthful man, who had read that the devil is
the father of all liars. He held his head thoughtfully for a moment.
“It is what I imagine would be the case,” said he. “On which
account I always disapprove of those pictures which, what you might
say, expose the body of a woman in the so-called interests of Art.
With a man and his wife—if I may say so—such things are different;
but to make a show of a woman’s nakedness, that is to me a form of
prostitution at which honestly I shudder every time it comes my
way.”
“I see—I see your point,” said my friend. “If there is to be
prostitution, let it be that of the wife. I see your point. But why call
marriage a sacrament? And why solemnise it in a church? I should
have thought the meat-market had been a better place.”
Great heavens! No wonder the disease is spreading! No wonder
is it that women approach the hour of deliverance in fear and
trembling, for neither do they fit themselves for it, nor are they
proud of the birthright which is theirs alone. For the sake of
appearances, because they are not well enough off, because of
inconvenience, they will give up all they possess for the mess of
pottage. Civilisation indeed has made a strange place of the world.
There are few men and women left in it now.
Now and again you may run across a true mother, but all the rest
of women that you meet are only fit to be called by a name that is
indeed too ugly to write.
A true woman I heard of only the other day. She was brought to
her bed of childbirth. In the room there was that still hush, the hush
of awe when out of the “nowhere into here” the something which is
life is about to be conjured out of the void of nothingness which is
death. For long, trembling moments all was still. The faint whispers
and muffled sounds only made the quietness yet more potent. And
then, suddenly, out of the silence, came the shrill living, trumpet-cry
of a new voice—the voice of a little child.
The woman stretched her arms and smiled, as if in that cry she
had heard the voice of God.
“You must lie still,” they whispered in her ear—“there is yet
another child.”
“Thank God!” she moaned, and the silence fell round them once
more.
 XVII
BELLWATTLE AND THE DIGNITY OF MEN