Abstract
Eighteenth-century fiction often places its underage characters in temporary families, only to move them to new families that prove equally flawed or fragmented. Simply put, storytelling structure proves reliant on family structure. For example, in many of the century’s most popular novels, although the child searches for a lost nuclear family, the plot seems most interested in the many replacements he or she inhabits during that search. Within the first few pages of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Moll is born in Newgate Prison, taken in by a group of gypsies, placed into the home of a poor school teacher, and integrated into the household of the mayor’s wife, where she is famously seduced by one son and marries another. In Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), the eponymous heroine leaves her protective guardian Villars to travel to London with the Mirvan family, where she is reclaimed by her grandmother before being able to reunite with her father. In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), Fanny is adopted into the Bertram household by her aunts; when she returns to her nuclear family, she realizes that she no longer feels at home there and returns to the Bertram’s. These well-known heroines’ shifting familial positions encourage us to reexamine the place the child inhabits within the household and to account for the non-biological family that recreates itself to accommodate the child. Taking its cue from the experiences of Moll, Evelina, and Fanny, this essay focuses on the economic and emotional roles the child plays in the flexible family that is under construction, and compares eighteenth-century legal definitions of the child, captured in the terminology of the legal treatise, to literary dramatizations of the child, central to the plotting of novels, plays, conduct books, and children’s literature. This comparison of factual and fictional understandings of the child reveals the law’s equation of the child with relationships of economic obligation, while the literary work emphasizes the child’s questioning of those obligations and plots his or her escape from them, often as part of a trajectory of self-realization. The law, quite predictably, is interested in positioning the child within stable family structures defined by legal devices such as contracts, while the literary work is interested in the dramatic possibilities provided by the disrupted, fragmented family, and highlights both the challenges and opportunities it affords the child.
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Notes
- 1.
David Garrick, The Guardian. A Comedy (London: J. Newberry, 1759) and Arthur Murphy, The Apprentice, A Farce (London: P. Valliant, 1756).
- 2.
Joanne Bailey, Parenting in England, 1760–1830: Emotion, Identity, and Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foster, eds. The Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies, and Families in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2004); Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (New York: Routledge, 2005); Ralph Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450–1700 (London: Longman, 1984); Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli, Family Life in Early Modern Times, 1500–1789 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001); Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) and A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children over Three Centuries (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1990); Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Academic Press, 1978). For a textbook-like overview of current research, also see Will Coster, Family and Kinship in England 1450–1800, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016).
- 3.
Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
- 4.
Matthew Hale, The Analysis of the Law (London: John Nutt, 1713), 45, 51. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically.
- 5.
Matthew Bacon, A New Abridgement of the Law (London: E. and R. Nutt, 1736–66). Subsequent citations appear parenthetically.
- 6.
Tadmor, Family and Friends, 24.
- 7.
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765), I: 410. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically.
- 8.
James Barry Bird, The Laws Respecting Wills, Testaments, and Codicils, and Executors, Administrators, and Guardians. Third Edition (London: W. Clarke, 1799); James Barry Bird, The Laws Respecting Masters and Servants; Articled Clerks, Apprentices, Journeymen and Manufacturers (London: W. Clarke, 1795).
- 9.
Guardianship demographics could be traced though a survey of a series of wills copied in local probate registers or proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury or through a survey of guardianship decisions that are recorded in Chancery’s incomplete (and unreliable) manuscript ‘Decree Rolls.’
- 10.
I explain how these orphaning numbers are generated in The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature: Estate, Blood, and Body (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 50–51.
- 11.
J.R. Holman, ‘Orphans in Pre-Industrial Towns: The Case of Bristol in the Late 17th Century,’ Local Population Studies 15 (Autumn 1975): 40–44.
- 12.
Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 160–73. See Chap. 4, ‘Parental Deprivation in the Past: A Note on Stepparenthood in English History.’
- 13.
Joan Lane, Apprenticeship in England, 1660–1914 (London: Routledge, 1996), 62.
- 14.
Blackstone, Commentaries, 448.
- 15.
Sir John Comyns, A Digest of the Laws of England. The Third Edition…by Stewart Kyd (London: A. Strahan, 1792), IV: 281.
- 16.
David Garrick, The Guardian. A Comedy (London: J. Newberry, 1759), 54.
- 17.
Eleanor Wikborg, The Lover as Father Figure in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Fiction (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 20.
- 18.
Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story (New York: Penguin, 1991).
- 19.
Inchbald, A Simple Story, 131–32.
- 20.
Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence & Youth in Early Modern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 85.
- 21.
Lane, Apprenticeship in England, 1660–1914, 2–3. Lane provides sample apprenticeship documents in her Appendix 1, 249–251. For additional studies of servants and apprentices, see Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks, eds. The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (London: Palgrave, 1994); Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London 1660–1730 (London: Methuen, 1989); J. Jean Hecht, The Domestic Servant in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1980); Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Denys Van Renen, The Other Exchange: Women, Servants, & the Urban Underclass in Early Modern English Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017).
- 22.
The Infants Lawyer: Or, the Law (Ancient and Modern) Relating to Infants (London: Robert Battersby, 1697), 192–3.
- 23.
Bird, The Laws Respecting Masters and Servants, 17, 32–33.
- 24.
Murphy, The Apprentice, 48.
- 25.
Ibid., 1.
- 26.
Ibid., 8–9.
- 27.
Edward Ward, The Reformer, Exposing the Vices of the Age in Several Characters. The Fourth Edition (London: J. How [1701?]), 30–31. This work is also published under the title The Libertines: Or, the Vices of the Age Expos’d, In Several Characters (1720).
- 28.
Henry Fielding, ‘A Description of U—n G—, (alias New Hog’s Norton) in Com. Hants’ in The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding: Miscellanies, Volume I, ed. Henry Knight Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 54.
- 29.
A Compleat, True and Genuine Account of the Life, Adventures, and Transactions of Robert Ramsey, alias Sir Robert Gray (London, H. Goreham, 1742); The Life of Nicholas Mooney, alias Jackson (Dublin, E. Golding, 1752).
- 30.
Samuel Richardson, The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum: or Young Man’s Pocket- Companion (London: J. Roberts, 1734), 2.
- 31.
Mitzi Myers, ‘Romancing the Moral Tale: Maria Edgeworth and the Problematics of Pedagogy,’ Romanticism and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. Ed. James Holt McGavran, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 101; Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 122–123; Lissa Paul, The Children’s Book Business: Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2011), 71–75.
- 32.
Anon., The History of Little Goody Two Shoes: The Third Edition (London: J. Newberry, 1766), 9.
- 33.
John Aikin and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Evenings at Home; or the Juvenile Budget Opened (6 vols. London: J. Johnson, 1793), III: 16.
- 34.
Ibid., 26.
- 35.
The Child’s Friend or Careful Guardian (London: J. Mackenzie [1800?]), 21.
- 36.
Hannah More, Cheap Repository. The Two Shoemakers in Five Parts (London: J. Evans [1795?]), 36.
- 37.
Thomas Day, The History of Little Jack (London: J. Stockdale, 1788), 54.
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Nixon, C. (2018). Wards and Apprentices: The Legal and Literary Construction of the Familial Position of the Child. In: O'Malley, A. (eds) Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods. Literary Cultures and Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94737-2_4
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