Didactic Literature of the 18th Century

1
Didactic Literature of the 18th Century

• English 505
• Dr. Karen Roggenkamp

2
Eighteenth-Century Publishing for Children

• Transitional period in terms of childhood and
  emerging childrens literature
• Momentum of market for print materials, including
  childrens print materials, continues to grow
• Child population also grows (mortality rates
  decline)
• Education becomes pressing concern
• Delay workeven until age 12 or 14 by 1760s
• Lines of philosophy need for religious and moral
  guidance, need for rational guidance, need for
  imaginative freedom

3
Fairy Tales and the Didactic Tradition

• Until early 19th century, fairy tales not widely
  accepted as suitable for middle class upper
  class children
• Filled with adult themes content
• Fairy tales largely published throughout 17th,
  18th centuries in chapbook formmixed audience
• Cheap, poor qualitybut wildly popular (problem
  of audience class)
• Illustrated

4
Fairy Tales in the Mainstream

• Slowly more respectable editions/translations
  published
• Perrault in English edition 1729
• More influentially, Grimm edition 1823, Hans
  Christian Andersen 1846
• Clean up earthy, frank chapbook versions and
  infuse with middle and upper-class world
  viewmoral teaching, class gender hierarchies,
  suppressed sexuality

5
Fairy Tales Will Rot Your Brain

• Why should the mind be filled with fantastic
  visions, instead of useful knowledge? Why should
  so much valuable time be lost? Why should we
  vitiate their taste, and spoil their appetite, by
  suffering them to feed upon sweetmeats?
• --Maria Edgeworth, The Parents Assistant (1796)

6
Conduct Matters

• Increasing preoccupation with educating children
  about social accomplishment, morality, and
  religious principles (Locke)
• But in competition with new flood of material
  that appeals to amusement imaginationfairy
  tales, rhymes, riddles, games (Rousseau)
• Books that try to merge didactic imaginative
  strains
• Image François de Salignac de La Mothe
  Fénelon, Treatise on the Education of Daughters,
  1805

7
Social Context

• Industrial Revolution (roughly 1750-1830)shift
  from rural/farming to urban/manufacturing economy
• Education as safeguard against instability
• Rise of mobile middle classes
• Teaching of industry, thrift, sobriety, morality
  as paths to success
• Reformersimprove society from family level up
• Image Richard Arkwright cotton spinning
  frame, 1768

8
John Newbery

• Publisher, bookseller, patent medicine dealer
• Published versions of Perraults fairy tales
• Real significance began serious business of
  publishing for children as respectable enterprise
• First to pay real attention to growing economic
  viability of children as an economic base
• Image Little Pretty Pocket Book, 1744

9
Little Goody Two-Shoes

• Another type of fairy tale?
• Many versions, adaptations
• What values celebrated? Style and method?
• Image American edition of History of
  Little Goody Two-Shoes, 1837