Persuasions #10, 1988 Pages 90-98 Fact and Fantasy: Jane Austen’s Childhood Reading FARNELL PARSONS St. Joseph’s Academy, St. Louis, Missouri Jane Austen’s childhood includes her life up until the completion of the
Juvenilia (1793), when she was seventeen.
Documentation of her reading or her acquaintance with specific works has
been provided by Chapman’s notes on the early writings1 and a list
of books which she either owned or shared with the family, some of them bearing
her signature.2 I have
gleaned the remainder from children’s books referred to in the novels,
autobiographies of contemporaries, and reading lists for young women of the
period, as well as social histories and histories of children’s
literature. Books that were known to be
in Jane’s family or were alluded to in her writings are marked thus, +. *
* * At the beginning of the eighteenth century, children’s reading was meant
to be instructive and was limited to school texts and works on conduct. If the children were sophisticated or bored,
they might find alternative reading in fables, romances and folklore (in
chapbooks), early editions of such fantasies as +A thousand and one nights,
though such literature was meant for adults.
Fairy tales had been banned by the Puritans because of their subversive,
superstitious and terrifying nature and this opposition continued so that the
ubiquitous chapbooks, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), with its grisly and
graphic details of executions, and the Bible provided all the
frightening and fanciful elements demanded of escapist literature. Avid young readers consumed adventure books
such as The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Robinson Crusoe (1719),
and Gulliver’s Travels (1726), which became enormously popular, the last
two quickly becoming chapbooks although no children’s edition of Bunyan’s work
was available until the nineteenth century.
Bradbrook feels that Jane read no fiction earlier than Pilgrim’s
Progress3 while Honan suggests that her last words, “Nothing but
death,” might have come from that book, “ ... now Christian looked for nothing
but death.”4 Royalist households may have resisted Puritan
works such as Pilgrim’s Progress, A Book for Boys and Girls
(1686), and Janeway’s Tokens (1672), but few would have excluded Watt’s Divine
Songs attempted in easy language for the use of children (1715), known as Divine
Songs (1812), verses that remained popular for well over a hundred years
until they were finally sabotaged by Lewis Carroll’s ridicule in 1865. Divine Songs was popular because of
Watts’s success in making them fun to learn, easy to remember, and appropriate
for general daily or weekly use. No
other poetry was as popular until the Taylors’ Original Poems for Infant
Minds (1804) when “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” became part of the
social fabric. By this time Jane was a
sophisticated lover of adult poetry, having quoted from Scott and other poets
included in Dodsley’s anthology, even in the Juvenilia. Blake had written his Songs of Innocence
(1789) but was not regarded as a children’s poet until long after that time. In the village of Steventon, the ordinary
cottager would have had no printed matter of any kind except the Bible and the
Prayer Book and the ballads “pasted on the wall” of “Joan of France,” “English
Moll,” “Fair Rosamund,” and “Robin Hood.”5 Mrs. Trimmer (1741-1810) would have added “The Berkshire Lady,”
“Chevy Chace,” and “The Lamentations of Jane Shore,” as favourites of the
peasant’s wife; according to her, none of them were immoral, ridiculing
religion or mentioning ghosts.6
Since at least two of these celebrated women were mistresses of kings
and courtiers, it is difficult to understand the approval of the future
“Guardian of Education.” Jane knew
about the mistress of Edward IV from Nicholas Rowe’s play, +Jane Shore,
first performed in 1714. It became a
repertory staple and remained so throughout the century. If the cottage wife with whom Jane spent her
first year or so were literate or had learned the verses, she could well have
heard rhymes from the earliest known collection, Tommy Thumb’s Song Book
for all little masters and misses; to be sung to them by their Nurses till they
can sing themselves. By Nurse
Lovechild. To which is added, a Letter
from a Lady on Nursing (1744). This
contained such verses as “Hush a by [sic] baby,” and “Patty Cake, Patty
Cake.” Its success was followed by Tommy
Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, Voll. [sic] II (1744), which contained
“Bah, bah a [sic] black sheep,” and an unbowdlerized version of “Little
Robin Redbreast.” The publisher of
these volumes, Mary Cooper, had produced a reading book, The Child’s New
Play-Thing (1742), which followed Lockean theory in entertaining as it
taught. Mother Goose’s Melody: or, Sonnets for the Cradle was published by
John Newbery or his successors (publication dates vary from c. 1765 to 1791)
and contained fifty-one rhymes including “Jack and Gill,” and “Se [sic]
saw, Margery Daw.” Oliver Goldsmith was
fond of children and entertained them with a rhyming game now known as “Two
little dickie birds,” printed in the Melody in its earlier form of
“There were two blackbirds.” This,
together with other parallels, lends uncertain evidence that Goldsmith helped
to write the book. John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book
(1744) was a milestone in the history of children’s literature, providing the
first book of “instruction with delight” that combined all the forms of
literature available to children for the past two centuries. Newbery’s motto was “Trade and Plumb-Cake
for ever, Huzza,” and his commercial genius added toys to accompany each
volume. This cheap but valuable book
opened the door for contributions by authors, Newbery himself befriending and
employing several, notably Goldsmith and Johnson, as hack writers. +The History of Goody Two-Shoes
(1765) which many believe to have been written by Goldsmith, was the first
children’s story to have a continuous plot.
It taught that industry and true worth entitled a worker to his or her
aspirations. Darton considers it the
foundation of the moral tale and of the unimaginative “virtue-is-its-own-reward”
type of story.7 The story
was first used as a pantomime theme in 1803 and by the second half of the
nineteenth century was a standard title. R.W. Chapman says that Mrs. Austen probably had
charge of the girls’ early education and Jane may have learned to read using
Mrs. Barbauld’s Lessons for Children (1778). This immensely successful work proved that children could easily
be taught to read if given simple narratives of familiar domestic life. This manual inspired Richard Edgeworth,
father of the celebrated Maria and a disciple of Rousseau, to begin his own
work Practical Education (1780) after two of his children learned to
read in six weeks. Jane admired Maria’s
novels but as a child would not have had the dubious advantage of her earlier
works. The prohibition on fairy tales was lifted when
the Perrault collection, Histoires, ou contes du temps passé. Avec des moralitez, charmed the French
courtiers and made its way across the Channel in Samber’s translation (1729) to
become Histories or Tales of Past Times, told by Mother Goose. These eight tales included “Cinderilla” [sic]
and “Sleeping Beauty,” and were an immediate success, the accompanying morals
making them acceptable. Perrault’s
version of Cinderella concluded with two moralities, the first declaring that
charm is more valuable than beauty and the second that, whatever your gifts or
talents, you need a godfather or godmother to make them effective. Bilingual versions were advertised by 1741
and were considered proper for children in boarding schools as well as in
private families. By about 1785, Cinderilla;
or the Little Glass Slipper began to appear separately as a chapbook. Fanny Price is certainly a Cinderella-type
heroine as Simpsons8 and Fraser9 have pointed out. Anne Elliot is another candidate with Sir
Walter combining the role of both mean stepmother and neglectful father in the
pantomime tradition of Baron Hardup.
Cinderella was first performed as a pantomime at Drury Lane in 1804. Prince Charming was borrowed from “The Blue
Bird” of Mme. D’Aulnoy’s collection of twenty-five fairy tales, Contes de
Fees or Tales of Mother Bunch, which also included “Finette Cendron,” a combination of Perrault’s “Hop o’ my Thumb” and “Cinderilla.” The first English version of these invented
stories was published in 1773. Fables continued to be part of education in the eighteenth century. Fashionable in schools and society as a teaching device for language and moral instruction, they were heavily politicized in various versions by L’Estrange (1692), Croxall (1722), and Richardson (1739-40). Each author had aimed at children, however, the versions by L’Estrange, Croxall and Dodsley (1761) standardized the stock human characters of the animals for young readers. Jane did not have a classical education requiring the Greek or Latin texts of Aesop for grammar and syntax but she did have a copy of +Fables Choisies of La Fontaine in French prose and may have been familiar with Moore’s Fables for the Female Sex (1744). This volume was popular in spite of its style while Gay’s Fables (1727, 1732) delighted Jane and others with their lively rendering of Aesop according to the times. Newbery was to cash in on the popularity with his Fables in Verse for the Improvement of the Young and the Old by “Abraham” Aesop, Esq., in 1757. Jane went briefly to school in Oxford with
Cassandra and this experience relieved their mother of her teaching duties and
freed their rooms for their father’s paying pupils. Honan suggests that the Oxford plan was designed to increase
their marriage chances by making their accomplishments more ladylike. Later on they attended the Abbey School in
Reading which was run by a woman called Mrs. Latournelle. Mary Martha Butt (1775-1801), also the
daughter of a minister, attended the same school sometime after Jane (1790-92)
and provides a wonderful account other childhood and her educational
experiences.10 Mary Butt read +Margery Two Shoes, Robinson
Crusoe, two sets of fairy tales (one d’Aulnoy’s), Aesop’s Fables and
The Little Female Academy. She
had a prayer book full of pictures, read the Bible every morning, shared her
father’s copy of Paradise Lost and, like Jane, was familiar with +The
Arabian Nights. She had acted in
one of Hannah More’s Sacred Dramas (1782), envied her cousin’s copy of
Plutarch’s Lives and met a young lady who knew Cecelia by
heart. Her stern but loving upbringing
included Latin, never sitting in her mother’s presence and existing on dry
bread and milk. This made her
appreciate the permissive atmosphere of the Abbey School more than Jane who
would have missed the warm and lively atmosphere at Steventon. At the school, Mary performed in “La Bonne
Mere” from Mme. de Genlis’ Theatre of Education, followed by an
entertainment of some part of Arnaud Berquin’s +L’ami des Enfans
(1782-83), which was translated into English as The Children’s Friend in
one version and The Looking-Glass for the Mind in another. The school had more of a French atmosphere
than in Jane’s day, being run by an émigré, Mr. St. Quintin, who gave
refuge to many compatriots after the Revolution. Mary Butt felt they were, in fact, leading what Mme. de Genlis
called “la vie de chateau.” Sarah Fielding’s Mrs. Teachum in The
Governess or The Little Female Academy (1749) could have been a
model for Mrs. Latournelle of the Abbey School, both of whom left pupils mostly
to their own devices. The fictional
pupils in the care of the older Jenny Peace, spent their considerable free time
in an arbour where they regaled and comforted each other with real and
imaginary stories. Mary Butt relished
the liberty which her class had after their lessons for an hour or so each
morning with Mr. St. Quintin, after which, “… no human being ever took the
trouble to consider where we spent the rest of the day between our meals;
whether we gossiped in one turret or another; whether we lounged about the
garden, or out of the window above the gateway. No one so much as said, ‘Where have you been?’ ” Shy Jane would have been free to read and to
observe amid the historic and reputedly ghostly Abbey ruins which later became
the Northanger Abbey of her novel.
Fielding’s novel combined moral instruction told in an entertaining
fashion and became the prototype of the English girls’ boarding school
story. It was admired and copied by
Mme. De Beaumont in +Magasin des Enfans, translated into English as The
Young Misses Magazine in 1757, Newbery’s The Rival Pupils, or A
New Holiday Gift for a Boarding School (1766), Fenn’s The Female
Guardian (1784), Mme. de Genlis’ Tales of the Castle (1785), and
Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life (1788). After the Abbey School, Jane’s education
continued at Steventon where she was free to use the family library as her
schoolroom. Her histories were those of
Hume, +The History of England (1759-62) and Robertson, History of
Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI till his
Accession to the Crown of England (1759), from which she may have gained
her allegiance to the unfortunate queen and her dislike of her executioner. She probably read Horace Walpole’s Historic
Doubts on Richard III (1768) and definitely knew Goldsmith’s +The
History of England, from the earliest times to the death of George II
(1771) which was the schoolroom staple at Steventon and which she was later to
parody. Religious works abounded in
collections of sermons but there is little evidence that she was familiar with
more than Blair’s Sermons (1777-1801), Secker’s Lectures on the
Catechism of the Church of England (1769) and Vickers,1 +A
companion to the altar (?1793) together with the Bible and the Book
of Common Prayer. Her knowledge of
the physical world was gained by observation, perhaps guided by Goldsmith’s +An
history of the earth, and animated nature (1774) and her geographical world
enlarged by Gilpin’s Tour to the Highlands (1789) and Johnson’s A
Journey to the Western Islands (1775).
Her knowledge of French was gained more from her cousin Eliza than the
fake “Mrs. Latournelle,” whose real name was Miss Sarah Hackett. Jane’s recreational reading would have
included anthologies like Knox’s Elegant Extracts (1784) containing
passages from Blair, Hurd, Sterne and Smollett, D’Israeli’s +Curiosities of
literature (1791) and, of course, copies of The Loiterer which her
brothers were producing as part of their Oxford education. In the Memoirs, Jane’s nephew says that
Jane was well educated though not highly accomplished. Courtesy and conduct books would have been
required reading for accomplished young men and women and the family collection
included Thomas Percival’s +A father’s instruction to his children
(1775), Ann Murry’s +Mentoria: or, The young ladies instructor (1780)
and the +works of the Marchioness de Lambert which would have contained A
Mother’s Advice to her Son (1726) and Advice to her Daughter
(1728). Devlin says she was doubtless
familiar with the Marquess of Halifax’s Advice to a Daughter (1700) and
Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son (1774) which condemned the
reading of romances such as +Orlando Furioso (1783) and Sophia Lee’s +The
Recess (1785).11 By the end of the eighteenth century, an
increasing number of women were influential in providing manuals of conduct
addressed to their own sex, such as Lady Sarah Pennington’s An Unfortunate
Mother’s Advice to Her Absent Daughters (1761) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s
poignant Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1786). Lady Sarah did not approve of novels which
she considered unrealistic and leading to poor judgement and fatal mistakes in
conduct. The one exception which she
found entertaining and instructive was Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield
(1766). Jane burlesqued a courtesy-book
character, Julia Miller, in The Female Philosopher and was later to draw
a fully-fledged courtesy-book heroine in Fanny Price. A paragon of virtue, Fanny is “ … reserved and modest, shrinking
from notice, speaking seldom in company, never attempting wit. She blushes easily, shuns flirting and the
company of rakes … and has been educated according to the Evangelical
prescription to have fine moral principles and excellent judgement.”12 If Fanny is the quintessential courtesy-book
character, Elizabeth Bennet is the quintessential feminist pitted against such
satiric objects of scorn as the accomplished Miss Bingley, Miss De Bourgh, and
Mary Bennet.13 Mary Wollstonecraft spoke bitterly from her own
experiences in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, when she told of
females educated and left without means who became nothing but upper servants
as teachers and governesses. She
recounted the fate of young women isolated from their peers; “A young mind
looks round for love and friendship; but love and friendship fly from poverty;
expect them not if you are poor.” Miss
Watson told her sister Emma of the horrors of becoming a teacher at a school and
Jane Fairfax echoed Wollstonecraft when she talked of becoming a governess to
earn her living. She likened her future
to entering an order and giving up comfort in exchange for a penitential life. She said, “There are places in town,
offices, where inquiry would soon produce something – Offices for the sale –
not quite of human flesh – but of human intellect … I was not thinking of the slave trade … governess trade … widely
different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater
misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies.” Jane rescues her namesake by the death of the wicked witch in a
fairy tale ending. From the 1740s on, a growing reading public
which had the time, money, education and inclination caused literature to
flourish, especially among young people and others newly literate. Francis Newbery (who had succeeded his
uncle) abridged Robinson Crusoe (c. 1768) and it was adapted for the
stage by Sheridan as a pantomime in 1781.
Newbery also produced a one-volume abridgement of Clarissa Harlowe
in 1768-69 and a summary of +Sir Charles Grandison together with Pamela
in 1756. Sir Charles Grandison
was also translated or transposed into French by Berquin as Le Petit
Grandisson [sic]. Chapbooks
remained popular among the ordinary people and through them the old fairy tales
stayed in circulation to re-emerge after the advent of the Grimm collection
made them more acceptable. As children became avid readers their fare
became more moralistic following the example of Goody Two Shoes and the
influence of the French, notably Mme. de Genlis and Arnaud Berquin. Moral tales were concerned with slavery,
cruelty to animals, and dispelling belief in fairies and resulted in such
influential works as Mrs. Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories Designed for the
instruction of children, respecting their treatment of animals (1786),
Dorothy Kilner’s The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse (1783), and
Thomas Day’s Sandford and Merton, published in three parts in 1783,
1786, and 1789. Day’s collection of moralistic stories connected by the educational interaction of Tommy Merton and Harry Sandford became tremendously popular and was translated into French by Berquin in 1798. Tommy Merton is a child spoiled by his indulgent mother and black servants in Jamaica who is rehabilitated by his education in England under his tutor, Barlow, and by his association with the good-natured Harry. In his thinly concealed didacticism, Day requires Tommy to consider negroes as equals and the boy reflects upon the “ridiculous prejudices” and the “foolish distinctions which pride had formerly suggested.” Day introduces a Miss Sukey Simmons whose upbringing required her to, “plunge into the cold bath at every season of the year, to rise by candlelight in winter, to ride a dozen miles upon a trotting horse, or to walk as many even with the hazard of being splashed, or of soiling her clothes. By this mode of education, Miss Sukey … acquired an excellent character, accompanied, however, with some dispositions which disqualified her almost as much as Harry for fashionable life … She was also … taught to believe that domestic economy is a point of utmost consequence to every woman who intends to be a wife or mother.” Sukey, who later is as courteous and spontaneously pleasant to the uncomfortable Harry as is Emma Watson towards young Charles, reminds us of Elizabeth Bennet who, “continued her walk alone, crossing field after field at a quick pace … finding herself at last within view of the house, with weary ankles, dirty stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of exercise.” Her dishevelled appearance causes the comment, “I hope you saw her petticoat, six inches deep in mud, I am absolutely certain; and the gown which had been let down to hide it not doing its office.” In the Day book, Miss Sukey’s singing is compared to that of Miss Matilda: … among the rest, Miss Simmons sang a little Scotch song, called Lochaber, in so artless, but sweet and pathetic a manner, that little Harry listened almost with tears in his eyes; … After this, Miss Matilda, who was allowed to be a perfect mistress of music, played and sang several celebrated Italian airs; but as these were in a language totally unintelligible to Harry, he received very little pleasure, though all the rest of the company were in raptures. She then proceeded to play several pieces of music, which were allowed by all connoisseurs to require infinite skill to execute. The audience seemed all delighted, and either felt, or pretended to feel, inexpressible pleasure … Dusinberre reminds us of a familiar passage in Pride and Prejudice:14 Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity
had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and
conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than
she had reached. Elizabeth, easy and
unaffected, had been listened to with much more pleasure, though not playing
half so well; and Mary, at the end of a long concerto, was glad to purchase
praise and gratitude by Scotch and Irish airs, at the request of her younger
sisters, who, with some of the Lucases, and two or three officers, joined
eagerly in dancing at one end of the room. Further similarities between Austen and Day occur when the
accomplishments of young ladies like Miss Darcy and Miss Matilda are commented
upon. Mrs. Merton, Tommy’s mother,
comments: “Indeed … one may see the excellence of her education in everything that Miss Matilda does. She plays most divinely upon the pianoforte, talks French even better than she does English, and draws in the style of a master. Indeed, I think that last figure of the naked Gladiator the finest thing I ever saw in my life.” Miss Bingley is equally effusive when she tells Darcy: “Tell your sister I am delighted to hear of her improvement on the harp; and pray let her know that I am quite in raptures with her beautiful little design for a table, and I think it infinitely superior to Miss Grantley’s.” Sandford and Merton was widely read and as late as Mrs.
Molesworth’s day (1839-1921), she was to say, “ … not only had no children many
books, but everywhere children had the same.
There was seldom any use in little friends lending to each other, for it
was always the same thing over again: Evenings at Home, Sandford &
Merton, Ornaments Discovered, and so on.”
As Townsend notes, these three titles were of the greatest
respectability in the most selective homes and there was much more less
recommended material. We can all be
grateful that the Austen family was tolerant and eclectic in their reading. NOTES 1 R.W.
Chapman, Minor works in The works of Jane Austen (London: Oxford
University Press, 1958), pp. 458-61. 2 David
Gilson, A bibliography of Jane Austen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982),
pp. 431-46. 3 Frank
W. Bradbrook, Jane Austen and her predecessors (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1966), p. 83. 4 Ibid.,
141-2. 5 Park
Honan, Jane Austen: her life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), p.
404. 6 F.J.
Harvey Darton, Children’s Books in England, 3rd edition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 174. 7 Ibid.,
p. 129. 8 Janice
C. Simpson, “Fanny Price as Cinderella: Folk and fairy-tale in Mansfield
Park” Persuasions, No. 9 (December 16, 1987), 25-30. 9
Katharine Fraser Miller, “The archetype in the drawing room: fairytale
structures in the novels of Jane Austen, Dissertation Abstracts Vol. 41,
No. 12, June 1981. 10 F.J. Harvey Darton,
editor. The life and times of Mrs. Sherwood
(1775-1851), from the diaries of Captain and Mrs. Sherwood (London: Wells Gardner, Darton & Co.,
Ltd., 1910). 11 D.D. Devlin, Jane Austen and Education
(New York: The Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1975), p. 25. 12 Marian E. Fowler, “The courtesy-book heroine
of Mansfield Park,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 44 (1974),
31-46. 13 ____ “The feminist bias of Pride and
Prejudice,” Dalhousie Review, 57 (1977), 47-64. 14 Juliet Dusinberre, Alice to the lighthouse:
Children’s books and radical experiments in art. (New York: Macmillan Press,
1987), pp. 41-42. ADDITIONAL REFERENCES Altick, Richard D. The English common reader. A social history of the mass reading public
1800-1900. University of Chicago Press,
1957. Blackham, H.J.
The fable as literature.
Athlone Press, 1985. Carpenter, Humphrey & Mari Prichard. The Oxford companion to children’s
literature. Oxford University
Press, 1984. Chapman, R.W.
Jane Austen: Selected letters.
Oxford University Press, 1985. Complete Novels of Jane Austen.
Modern Library, n.d. Day, Thomas. The history of Sandford and Merton. Hurd and Houghton, 1865. Dictionary of National Biography.
Oxford University Press, 1917. Drabble, Margaret, editor. Jane Austen: Lady Susan, The Watsons,
Sanditon. Penguin Books, 1974. Fergus, Jan.
Jane Austen and the didactic novel. Barnes & Noble Books, 1983. Gardiner, Dorothy. English girlhood at school. A study of women’s education through twelve centuries. Oxford University Press, 1929. Jane Austen: Love and Freindship and other
early works. The Women’s Press, London: 1977. Lascelles, Mary. Jane Austen and her art.
Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1939. Roth, Barry.
An annotated bibliography of Jane Austen studies 1973-83. University Press of Virginia, 1985. Todd, Janet M., ed. A Wollstonecraft anthology. Indiana University Press,
1977. Townsend, John Rowe. Written for children.
New edition. Penguin Books,
1983. |