Abstract
This chapter surveys existing scholarship on infancy and childhood during the Romantic period and positions the collection in relation to these debates. Starting from the familiar claim that the Romantics invented childhood, this chapter reconsiders the now well-established idea that the cultural history of infancy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can best be understood in terms of a transition from the stadial paradigm prevalent in Enlightenment cultural texts towards the more genetic conception associated with Romanticism. This chapter also sets out the central claim of the volume as a whole: that the engagement with infancy during the Romantic period reveals some key features of the Romantic episteme, that is, the manner in which knowledge was produced and structured at the time.
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Notes
- 1.
Immanuel Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, transl. Mary Smith; available at http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/ccread/etscc/kant.html (last accessed April 2019).
- 2.
William Wordsworth, ‘My heart leaps up’, l. 7; quoted from Stephen Gill (ed.), William Wordsworth: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008). Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Wordsworth are from this edition.
- 3.
Andrew O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods (London: Palgrave, 2018), introduction, p. 1.
- 4.
See, for example, the entries on ‘infant’ and ‘infancy’ in Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and William Nicholson, The British Encyclopedia (1809).
- 5.
In The Order of Things (1966), Foucault uses the term episteme to signify that which ‘defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice’ (see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1970), p. 183.
- 6.
In ‘Crusoe’s Children’, Andrew O’Malley notes ‘the growing nexus of metaphorical associations attached to [childhood] by adults’ as the eighteenth century progresses. See Andrew O’Malley, ‘Crusoe’s Children: Robinson Crusoe and the Culture of the Childhood in the Eighteenth Century’, in Adrienne Gavin (ed.), The Child in British Literature (London: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 87–100 (91).
- 7.
In his introduction to Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, O’Malley confirms that ‘the eighteenth century has long been regarded as a watershed period in the history of both childhood and children’s literature’ (p. 1). In The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (London: Cambridge University Press, 1959), Charles Percy Snow coined the expression ‘two cultures’ to refer to the division between the arts and the sciences, as distinct and sometimes opposed, means of knowing and describing the world.
- 8.
Adrienne Gavin (ed.), The Child in British Literature (London: Palgrave, 2012), ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–8.
- 9.
Gavin, ‘Introduction’, in The Child in British Literature, p. 8; Roderick McGillis, ‘Irony and Performance: The Romantic Child’, in Gavin (ed.), The Child in British Literature, pp. 101–115 (101–2).
- 10.
Ann Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 5.
- 11.
Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. xii, 1–2.
- 12.
Horace Elisha Scudder, ‘Childhood in English Literature’, The Atlantic Monthly (1885), p. 474; quoted from Plotz, Vocation, p. 1.
- 13.
Stephen Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. viii.
- 14.
Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 29.
- 15.
Gavin, The Child in British Literature, pp. 2, 9.
- 16.
D. B. Ruderman, The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry: Romanticism, Subjectivity, Form (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 10.
- 17.
Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 9.
- 18.
McGann defines ‘the romantic ideology’ as the discourse of ‘Romanticism’s own self-representations’ which, McGann suggests, has enjoyed ‘uncritical absorption’ in much scholarly work done on the Romantic period (see Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 1.).
- 19.
Plotz, Vocation of Childhood, pp. 4–5.
- 20.
Plotz, Vocation of Childhood, p. 5.
- 21.
Plotz , Vocation of Childhood, p. 39. In his contribution to our volume, Robert Rix re-evaluates Blake’s headline investment in infancy in relation to debates about children and children’s education in the late eighteenth-century and Romantic-period traditions of dissent and evangelicalism.
- 22.
Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 5.
- 23.
Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 6.
- 24.
Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 6.
- 25.
Ruderman, Idea of Infancy, p. 2.
- 26.
Ruderman, Idea of Infancy, p. 4.
- 27.
Ruderman, Idea of Infancy, p. 3.
- 28.
Paula Fass, The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 3.
- 29.
O’Malley, Making of the Modern Child, p. 6.
- 30.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, quoted from Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy (eds.), Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected Poems and Prose (London: Penguin, 2017), p. 653; unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent references to Shelley’s work are to this edition. For a detailed recent reading of Shelley’s analogy in the context of stadial models of societal and racial development, see Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, pp. 12–16.
- 31.
For a recent essay on the early intermixture of ideas about race and infancy in an American context, see Jennifer Thorn, ‘Lemuel Haynes and “Little Adults”: Race and the Prehistory of Childhood in Early New England’, in O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, pp. 281–99.
- 32.
See O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Childhoods, p. 1; and O’Malley, Making of the Modern Child, pp. 5, 11.
- 33.
O’Malley, Making of the Modern Child, p. 11.
- 34.
See Anja Müller, ‘Circulating Childhood in Eighteenth-Century England: The Cultural Work of Periodicals’, in O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, pp. 35–50 (35–6). See also Anja Müller, Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689–1789 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
- 35.
Teresa Michals, ‘Age, Status, and Reading in the Eighteenth Century’, in O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, pp. 15–33 (15). See, for example, Andrew O’Malley, Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe (London: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 11–12; and Mintz, History of American Childhood, pp. 75–93.
- 36.
Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 5.
- 37.
Ruderman, Idea of Infancy, p. 4.
- 38.
Ruderman, Idea of Infancy, pp. 3, 4.
- 39.
Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 5.
- 40.
O’Malley, Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, p. 3.
- 41.
Many of the problems of this dichotomy were embodied in the entangled critical debate, in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, around the slippery and now largely outdated concept of ‘pre-Romanticism’. For a flavour of this debate see, for example: Marshall Brown, Preromanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Rolf Lessenich, Aspects of English Preromanticism (Cologne: Böhlau, 1989).
- 42.
See Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, pp. 12–16.
- 43.
Ruderman, Idea of Infancy, p. 7.
- 44.
O’Malley, Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, pp. 11–12; see also O’Malley, Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, p. 3.
- 45.
Gavin, The Child in British Literature, p. 3.
- 46.
Ruderman, Idea of Infancy, p. 7.
- 47.
O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Childhoods, p. 1.
- 48.
For a recent study of the role of literacy in these debates about language acquisition and the human-animal divide, see Ann Wierda Rowland, ‘Learned Pigs and Literate Children: Becoming Human in Eighteenth-Century Literary Cultures’, in O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, pp. 99–115.
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Domines Veliki, M., Duffy, C. (2020). Introduction: The Romantic Cultures of Infancy. In: Domines Veliki, M., Duffy, C. (eds) Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8_1
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