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THROUGH FAIRIES, LULLABIES AND
STRICT MORALS
As we have already seen, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born in 1832, five years before Queen Victoria ascended the throne. He lived in what is formally known as the ”Victorian Age”, a long span of time from 1837 to 1901 (though this definition only corresponds to the reign of Queen Victoria). The era followed the Georgian period and preceded the Edwardian one. It was in these years that England reached its height as a world imperial power. It was indeed an era of peace and prosperity in which the population rose from 13.9 million in 1831 to 32.5 million in 1901. This was due to the fertility rate, which increased a lot for two reasons: one is biological, in fact with improving living standards, the percentage of women who were able to have children increased; the other one could be defined ‘social’, as it regards the increase of the marriage rate. Simultaneously, there was a decrease of mortality rate, due to the improvement in the quality of life, work and even nutrition and drinking water.
Historians divide the Victorian era in three different periods: the Early period (1830-1848); the Mid-Victorian period (1848-1870); and the Late period (1870-1901).
The Early Victorian period is marked by two major events: the expansion of public railway and the Reform Act of 1832, which gave representation to previously underrepresented urban areas and extended the qualifications for voting. This period also became famous under the name of “Time of Troubles”, due to the advent of industrialization which produced a rapid change on a profound scale; working conditions were deplorable for the majority of people, including women and children, who worked in mines and factories and were exploited.
The mid-Victorian era was somewhat less tumultuous than was the earlier one. It was a period of economic prosperity and progress in science and architecture. Many Victorian gentlemen in fact, devoted their time to the study of natural history, which was most powerfully advanced by Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution first published in his
On the Origin of Species in 1859. As for architecture, the greatness of the new British
engineering is testified by the construction of the Crystal Palace, a cast-iron and plate-glass structure initially erected in Hyde Park, to house the Great Exhibition, in 1851.
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Furthermore, there was a consistent improvement in communications, not only due to the advent of the railway, but also with the great sewage system of London and the improvement and expansion of water supply network.
For many, the Late-Victorian period was merely an extension, at least on the surface, of the affluence of the preceding years. In 1901, London was still the centre of the empire. This period was influenced by two important political figures: the conservative Benjamin Disraeli and the liberal William Gladstone. In January 1867, while the Conservatives were in power, Disraeli introduced the Second Reform Bill. The bill was urged along by a popular movement to expand the vote to members of the British working class, most of whom owned no property and lived in the cities. The bill itself reduced property requirements for voting, and working-class folks who earned a certain income were given the right to vote. The bill was seen as an important achievement for Disraeli, who became Prime Minister in February 1868. His ministry was short-lived, however, and the Liberals under William Gladstone took control of the Commons in December that year. The Queen favoured Disraeli's conservative politics and his imperialist views in foreign policy. She detested Gladstone's democratic sensibilities as well as his personality, so she was upset at the arrival of Gladstone’s ministry. Although she generally wished to preserve a policy of official neutrality between the two political parties, her generally conservative views and her dislike of Gladstone's manner made it difficult to get along with him. But to her relief February 1874 brought a Conservative victory at the polls, along with a second Disraeli ministry. After a second take-over of the Liberals in 1880’s, the Queen was again forced to deal with a Gladstonian cabinet for the next five years. Domestic politics during those five years were dominated by a push for a third Reform Bill and by what was always referred to as the "Irish Question”, whose tensions never eased.
Queen Victoria herself was very much against Home Rule for Ireland, which was one of the reasons she considered Gladstone's politics so disagreeable. She was relieved from dealing with him in her Cabinet in June 1885, when the Conservatives retook Parliament and Lord Salisbury replaced Gladstone as Prime Minister.
The Late-Victorian period was also the age in which modern democracy, feminism, socialism and Marxism took form. But the most important new idea was Darwin’s “Theory of Evolution”, which undermined the religious beliefs and the model of creationism.
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SOCIAL CLASS SYSTEM AND VALUES
The social hierarchy of Victorian England demonstrates the social class system and the social divisions of English people on certain terms and conditions in a pre-defined specific ladder of pattern. But there were some changes in social class system. For example the aristocrat class became upper class and some of the increasingly powerful upper middle class categories secured their places in this upper class. Let us go into details.
The Upper Class was the highest social class of the Victorian society. People under this class did not work manually. Their income normally came from the investments made by them or from the inherited lands. This class was subdivided into three parts: Royal Class (people from royal family and the spiritual lords of that time); Middle Upper Class (including great officers and the baronets along with temporal lords); Lower Upper Class, (including country wealthy gentleman and large scale business men who had made their way with the immense wealth they possessed).
The Middle Class was the largest one in the Victorian society and it benefited the most from the Industrial Revolution. It consisted of people who made their living from the salaries they got according to the job done and it included two sub-classes: Higher Level Middle Class (high in terms of salary) and Lower Level Middle Class (people who worked on the orders of the higher level middle class people).
The Working Class was characterized by a group of workers sub-divided into two groups: the Skilled Class (people who had unskilled labours working under their supervision) and Unskilled Class (lowest category labour people).
And last we have the Under Class, characterized by poor people, prostitutes, homeless and sick people.
The Victorians were great moralisers. They promoted a code of values based on personal duty, hard work, respectability and charity. To be a good person in Victorian society, everybody had to possess good manners, a good house with servants and a carriage, go regularly to the church and do charitable activity. Victorian morality can be described as a set of values that supported sexual repression, low tolerance of crime, and a strong social ethic. Verbal and written communication about emotions and sexual feelings were mostly discussed in the language of the flowers. However, there were some
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explicit erotic writings, the most famous one being called My Secret Life and those published in the magazine The Pearl, which also came out as a book in the 1960s. Homosexuality was illegal although many famous men from the British Isles were notorious homosexuals, the most famous one was probably Oscar Wilde.
A NEW CONCEPT OF “FAMILY”
The Victorian family was patriarchal, with the man representing authority and the woman educating the children and managing the house. Families were larger compared to families nowadays and upper and middle class families usually lived in big and comfortable houses. For the parents the upbringing of their children was the most important responsibility. They believed that a child must know the difference between right and wrong in order to become a thoughtful, moral adult. Consequently, when a child did something wrong it would be punished. The father was the head of the family and the household. He was most strict and obeyed by everyone. The children did not dare to talk back to him. They always spoke politely and respected him by calling him 'Sir'. The mother would spend her time planning dinner parties, visiting the dressmaker, or calling on her friends. She did not engage in household chores like cleaning, cooking, or washing clothes.
Every household, except for the poorest families, had servants for the everyday chores. The cook and the butler were the most important ones. Housemaids cleaned the rooms and footmen did the heavy work. Nannies were supposed to watch over the kids, dress them, amuse them, take them out and teach them how to behave.
FROM THE NURSERY TO THE OFFICE
Life for children in Victorian times was nothing like childhood in today’s world. For the wealthy there was an overwhelming sense of boredom and the constant prodding to be proper and polite with very little parent to child communication. Children did not see much of their parents, spending most of their time in the nursery or being brought up by nannies (some children would see their parents not more often than once a day). In some households the mother would teach their children how to read and write while the father
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would educate the sons in Latin. As the children grew older, tutors and governesses were employed and boys were usually sent off to boarding schools. They were expected to work hard while the daughters had to stay home and get married as soon as possible.
The poor Victorian Children lived a very different life from the children of wealthier families. They didn’t have nice houses to live in or extravagant toys, clothes or fine foods that the rich kids had. They lived in much smaller houses or even single rooms. Living in these tight quarters caused the family to be much closer. Without the presence of a nanny the parents raised the children and were the guiding force in their lives. This did not always translate into a more loving atmosphere though. Since a large part of the poor children had to do public jobs to help support their families, many parents thought of children economically, and having more children who worked raised the income of the home. Many parents had 10 or 12 or even more children for this reason alone.
Victorian children would be made to go to work at a very young age (sometimes even when 4 or 5 years old). They worked very hard and for long hours every day, most of the time in filthy conditions. The jobs they were in demand for, included mining, factory work, street sweepers, clothing and hat makers, chimney sweeps, farming, textile mills, servants, and sadly, prostitution, and all in dreadful conditions.
THE ANGEL OF THE HOUSE
Despite the fact that the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867 changed voting rights by granting a political voice to many among the working class who had not enjoyed any such voice before, women were not included in these reforms. In fact they had limited access to education, could not vote or hold public office, and could not own property (until 1870).
The Victorian was the age in which even piano legs were covered and when doctors warned that sex more than twice a week could lead to cancer and early death. In other terms, it was permeated by a rigid spirit and dominated by strict moral rules. Women were expected to conform to an artificial notion of 'feminine delicacy' which excluded exercise except for gentle walking, obliged them to wear tightly laced corsets which in any case made exercise impossible, and often limited their education to refined “accomplishments” like singing and drawing. Many Victorians believed that the differences between men and women were determined by nature.
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Women were thought to be more innocent and generous than men: naturally more disposed to sacrifice. William Gladstone, Prime Minister four times in the late 19th century, believed that giving women the vote would endanger “their delicacy”. Often, young girls were not allowed even to read the newspapers, for fear of the evil effects of contact with the real world.
The Victorians derived from these beliefs a double standard: one rule of conduct for men, and a more severe one for women. This was most evident in married life. On her marriage, a woman's property passed automatically into her husband's hands. If a woman tried to escape from a violent husband, he could kidnap and imprison her with the support of the law. In fact, before the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, divorce was practically impossible. This act, however, was not impartial: a husband could divorce his wife if she committed adultery, but the woman who wanted a divorce had to prove her husband guilty not only of adultery, but also of incest, bigamy, bestiality, cruelty or desertion. If a man did not commit adultery, he could treat his wife as badly as he liked: cruelty alone was not sufficient for divorce and, for many women, the only chance of survival laid in prostitution.
THE MIRROR OF SOCIETY: THE NOVEL
The 19th century is often regarded as a high point in British literature. This is a period of transition and literature creates a link between the writers of the romantic period and the very different literature of the 20th century. The intellectuals and artists of the age had to deal in some way with the upheavals in society, the obvious inequities of abundance for a few and squalor for many, and the new issues posed by scientific discoveries.
The novel became the main voice of the period, as the poem was during Romanticism. Publishing a novel in England during this period was undoubtedly a lavish challenge and books were too expensive for ordinary people. Nevertheless people used to frequent circulating libraries where they could have free access to many books and one third of the volumes were indeed novels. In addition to this, novels were also published in more affordable editions for less wealthy people. They were usually very long stories consisting of three volumes, but they could weekly be serialized in episodes, like today’s soap-operas.
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Many novels were published in serial form, along with short stories and poetry, in such literary magazines as Household Words. The novel was the ideal form to describe contemporary life and to entertain the middle class. Victorian novels tended to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end; virtue would be rewarded and wrongdoers were suitably punished. They tended to be of an improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart, mixed with a heavy dose of sentiment.
In their works, novelists described society as they saw it, with all its positive and negative aspects. A great number of novels were written by women, but some of them used a male pseudonym. After the first edition in three volumes (or the serialized edition), the novel could be published in a cheaper edition: just one volume with an inferior price. Reading was no longer just a privilege for rich people, but became a shared need, a way to escape from the oppressive reality of the time. So the reading public gradually shifted from the upper classes down to the lower social classes. But if this was a positive aspect on one hand, on the other hand it simultaneously favoured the revival of censorship. In fact it started to display the need of controlling and “guiding” the reading public towards what it was good to read and what was not.
It is possible to divide Victorian narrative into three groups: the Early- Victorian novel, whose main discussed themes were social and humanitarian (Charles Dickens, the most famous exponent); The Mid- Victorian novel, with its romantic and gothic traditions, whose most famous writers were Brontë sisters and Robert L. Stevenson; and The Late- Victorian novel, whose most important exponents were Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy and which is characterized by a constant sense of dissatisfaction with the values of the age.
OTHER LITERATURE: THE ROLE OF THE CHILD AND LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN
From around the middle of the 18th century, many people in Britain began to think about childhood in new ways. As a result, much of the earliest children’s literature was concerned with saving children’s souls through instruction and by providing role models for their behaviour, but this religious way of thinking about childhood became less influential by the mid-18th century; in fact, childhood came to be associated with a set of
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positive meanings and attributes such as innocence, freedom, creativity, pureness and spontaneity.
Central to the change in how childhood was understood was the work of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Émile, or On Education (1762) not only rejects the doctrine of “Original Sin”, but affirms that children are innately innocent, only becoming corrupted through experience of the world. Rousseau’s ideas soon found their way into children’s literature and childhood came to be seen as especially close to God and a force for good. In children’s literature, this idealised version of childhood became and remained enormously influential throughout the 19th and into the 20th century, even though not everyone agreed with Rousseau’s theories about the nature of childhood. The 19th century saw the development of what is sometimes called the “Cult of Childhood”, with adults exultantly celebrating childhood in texts and images. It flourished in England when Blake and the Romantics embodied it in their poetry. “It was Blake who declared the 'vast majority of children to be on the side of Imagination or Spiritual Sensation,' " says Peter Coveney, adding that in Blake "we have the first
coordinated utterance of the Romantic imaginative and spiritually sensitive child".1
For Romantic poets, like Wordsworth and Blake in fact, “children have access to a kind of visionary simplicity that is denied to adults… they are in a higher state of spiritual
perception than adults, because of their nearness to their birth”. 2
Around the middle of 19th century the change of attitude towards children became visible in adult novels, for instance in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, both published in 1847 by Charlotte and Emily Brontë, where children have a clear and heightened vision of the world. But more than any other novelists of this period, Dickens was the one who fully perceived the value of the child’s eye-view.
Many writers of the “Golden Age” of children’s literature (beginning in the 1860s with Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) went even further, expressing the desire to be children themselves once more as, for instance, Carroll put it in his poem Solitude:
1 P. COVENEY, The Image of Childhood: The Individual and Society: A Study of the Theme in English
Literature, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1967, p. 110.
2 K. REYNOLDS, “Perceptions of Childhood”, in J. SATTAUR, Children's Literature: From the Fin de Siecle to
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I'd give all the wealth that years have piled, the slow result of life's decay,
To be once more a little child for one bright summer day.3
The Cult of Childhood persisted into the 20th century, reaching its height in J. M. Barrie’s
Peter Pan (the first appeared in a play of 1904), a carefree boy who strongly refused to
grow up. The research of this “perpetual childhood” and the tendency of remaining a child forever can be particularly found in many books of that period, such as in Kingsley’s
Water-Babies (1862) and in George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1868).
By the end of the 18th century, children’s literature was a flourishing, separate and secure part of the publishing industry in Britain even though these books can seem pretty dry nowadays, since they were often very moralising and pious. Children read, certainly, but the books that they probably enjoyed reading (or hearing) most, were not designed especially for them, but indeed published for children and adults alike. Most moral tales were set in familiar environments: middle-class homes, nicely kept gardens, well-to-do villages and cities, which would maximize the reader’s identification with the characters and their dangers and dilemmas. The values being taught were generally familiar too: hard work, honesty, solicitude for others, politeness, charity, obedience to parents and a rationality which disdained fear of the dark or ghosts and rejected sentimentality or excessive emotion.
In the first half of the 18th century a few books that did not have an obviously instructional or religious agenda were published especially for children, such as A Little
Book for Little Children (1712), which included riddles and rhymes and a copiously
illustrated bestiary, A Description of Three Hundred Animals (1730). But the turning point came in the 1740s, when a cluster of London 256 publishers began to produce new books, more colourful and rich of pictures, designed to instruct and delight young readers.
The most notable of these innovative writers was John Newbery, an English publisher of books and considered the “father of children’s literature”, whose first book for the entertainment of children was A Little Pretty Pocket-Book Intended for the Instruction and
Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly (1744). It was indeed a pretty
3 L.CARROLL, “Solitude”, in T. READ, Lewis Carroll The Ultimate Collection, Copenhagen, T. Read Publisher,
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book, small, neat and bound in brightly coloured paper, in order to get the children’s attention. It cost six pence, but for an extra two the purchaser received a red and black ball or pincushion where the child was to record his behaviour by either sticking a pin in the red side for good behaviour or the black side if they were bad. The book consisted of simple proverbs, games, rules for children’s good manners and the letters of the alphabet taught through simple rhymes and illustrations.
He also produced the first children’s periodical called The Lilliputian Magazine (1751), a miscellany of stories, verse, riddles and chatty editorials. But his most famous work was
The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765), which has a good claim to be called the first
children’s novel. It can be considered a first example and a variation of the Cinderella story, for it talks about a poor orphan girl who has got only one shoe until the day she meets a rich gentleman who gives her a complete pair and she starts telling everybody she had now two shoes thanks to that gentleman. Later she becomes a teacher and marries a widower. This earning of wealth serves as proof that her virtuousness has been rewarded, a popular theme in children's literature of the era. The book, at first
anonymous, was later attributed to the Irish author Oliver Goldsmith, though this is
disputed. In his introduction to an 1881 edition of the book, Charles Welsh wrote: “Goody Two-Shoes was published in April 1765, and few nursery books have had a wider circulation, or have retained their position so long. The number of editions that have been published, both in England and America, is legion, and it has appeared in mutilated versions, under the auspices of numerous publishing houses in London and the provinces,
although of late years there have been no new issues”.4
The reasons for this sudden rise of children's literature have never been fully explained, but whatever the causes, the result was a fairly rapid expansion of children’s literature through the second half of the 18th century, so that by the early 1800s, the children’s book business was booming. For the first time it was possible for authors to make a living out of writing for children, and to become famous for it.
4 C. WELSH, Goody Two-Shoes: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Edition of 1766, London, Griffith & Farran,
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www.mentalfloss.com www.wikipedia.com
A rhyme in the Little Pretty Pocket-Book. The cover of the 1888 edition of Goody Two Shoes.
As for famous writers of books for children we cannot but mention the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1975), not only one of the most famous authors in Europe, but also an essential clue and a starting point in order to analyse and understand the poetics and the issues of Victorian English writers of children’s literature I will discuss later: “Andersen's fairy tales, which have been translated into more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness, readily accessible to children, but presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of
adversity for mature readers as well”.5
Even though Andersen does not belong to English literature, his works influenced many famous English writers such as Dickens, E. Browning, Thackeray, C. Bronte, M. Tulliver and Wilde:
Like the drenched girl who knocks on the city gate in a storm at the beginning of Andersen's The
Princess and the Pea, the plainly dressed Jane Eyre wins the hero by her extraordinary sensitivity;
like the ungainly chick in The Ugly Duckling, Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss is one of the many plain or tomboyish young heroines who turn into beauties... As for Thackeray himself, he adopts a very similar narrative persona to Andersen, shaking his head over the follies of his characters and sighing slightly mockingly with them over their disappointed loves. The later chapters of Vanity Fair, written after Thackeray's first enthralled acquaintance with Andersen's work, often echo his work. The green-eyed Becky Sharpe is memorably depicted in Chapter 64 as a siren with a fishy tail, the product of an undersea world as horribly evil as that inhabited by the sea-witch in Andersen's Little Mermaid. 6
5 J. WULLSCHLAGER, Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller, Chicago, University of Chicago Press,
2000, p. 15.
6 J. BANERJEE, "Hans Christian Andersen and the Victorians” in Literature, Culture and History in Victorian
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In June 1847 Andersen paid his first visit to England and he first met Dickens. About this first meeting, Andersen wrote in his diary: "We had come to the veranda, I was so
happy to see and speak to England's now living writer, whom I love the most”.7 The two
authors respected each other's work and had something in common as writers: they used to depict the poor and the underclass people , who often had difficult lives during the Industrial Revolution, through their novels. One of Dicken’s novels that better shows these issues is indeed Oliver Twist (1837), in which Dickens satirizes the hypocrisies of his time, including child labour, the recruitment of children as criminals, and the presence of street children. The protagonist is an orphan child, Oliver, who, like Dickens himself when he was young lives in a workhouse and is very poor. Yet, as we can notice, the figure of the child is used as an instrument, in this specific case to show the reality of the time and to denounce the injustices towards the weakest people. In Great Expectations (1860), the main character is again an orphan and this choice could be linked with Dickens’ s idea of the “Victorian child” and the attention he wanted the society to put on him. So it is not unusual finding numerous works dedicated to children in his production. Beginning with
The Life of Our Lord (1846-1849), a book about the life of Jesus Christ, he used to read
aloud to his young children every Christmas and which contained Jesus's life and teachings: “My Dear Children, I am very anxious that you should know something about the History of Jesus Christ. For everybody ought to know about Him. No one ever lived who was so good, so kind, so gentle, and so sorry for all people who did wrong, or were in
any way ill or miserable, as He was”.8 This was undoubtedly a way of teaching children
what was right and what was not and how to behave properly. “A Child’s Dream of a Star” is a short story we can find in Dicken’s Household Words (1850-1859), a weekly magazine published every Saturday. It can be considered a good-night story, which tells about a brother and a sister who were always together. “There was one clear shining star that used to come out in the sky before the rest, near the church spire, above the graves. It was larger and more beautiful, they thought, than all others, and every night they
watched for it, standing hand in hand at the window”.9
7
H.C.ANDERSEN, Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales: A New Translation by Reginald Spink, London, J. M. Dent &
Sons Ltd., 1958, p. 162.
8
C. DICKENS, The Life of Our Lord: Written for His Children During the Years 1846 to 1849, Westminster, John Knox Press, 1981, p. 13.
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Another short story which appears in this magazine is “A Child’s History of England”, a text in serial form consisting of three volumes. It was a history book Dickens dedicated to "My own dear children, whom I hope it may help, bye and bye, to read with interest larger and better books on the same subject"10 . "The Child's Story" in A Round of Stories
by the Christmas Fire is another short story which appears in the Christmas number of Household Words of 1852. It tells about the importance of keeping memories of those we
lost and it has a religious nature since eventually the traveller (the main character of the story) is compared to the Grandfather, who never forgets us and whom we will never forget:
So the traveller sat down by the side of that old man, face to face with the serene sunset; and all his friends came softly back and stood around him. The beautiful child, the handsome boy, the young man in love, the father, mother, and children: every one of them was there, and he had lost nothing. So, he loved them all, and was kind and forbearing with them all, and was always pleased to watch them all, and they all honoured and loved him. And I think the traveller must be yourself, dear Grandfather, because this what you do to us, and what we do to you.11
Another notable story is “Tom Tiddler's Ground”, in which Dickens gives an excellent and spot-on description of a hermit. He shows much empathy and identification with a lonely child (perhaps shades of his own childhood). It is curious to notice that the title of the story gives the name to one of the most ancient children’s game in which one player, "Tom Tiddler," stands on a heap of stones and other players rush onto the heap, shouting "here I am on Tom Tiddler's ground" while Tom tries to capture the invaders or keep them off.
A Holiday Romance (1868) is a four-part novel which can be considered unique among
that author's prodigious literary output of the time. In fact It is narrated by a succession of children who do not grow up to acquire adult voices that contain their childhood personas; it was intended primarily for a child audience, to whom in many cases (and as Dickens likely anticipated) it was read aloud and it was first published in a new illustrated American children's magazine, issued monthly, rather than in Dicken’s own journal or weekly magazines for adults. The peculiarities of this book are the illustrations. Dickens suggested to publisher James T. Fields that the book had to be accurately illustrated, but
10
C. DICKENS, “A Child’s History of England”, in Household Words, III, 53, 1851, p. 19.
11 C. DICKENS, Charles Dickens Stories From The Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All The Year
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Fields was too busy at that time so he engaged a periodical illustrator, John Gilbert, to produce four full-page plates, to be accompanied by the four elaborate initial-letter vignettes.
Even though it is not possible to establish that Dickens had such control over the artists' nine plates for A Holiday Romance, Gilbert's large illustrations through allegory and symbol as well as through realisation of a narrated moment, comment upon the original text; consequently, they should not be omitted from a consideration of how this four-part serial by Dickens would have been interpreted by his original readers.
Another author who has been influenced by Andersen’ s children’s literature is John Ruskin (1819-1900). His most famous fable for children is in fact The King of the Golden
River or The Black Brothers: A Legend of Stiria (1841), which illustrates the triumph of
goodness over evil and by which John Ruskin could impart to his readers that love, kindness, and philanthropy could transform the world. It is again a way of teaching moral values, especially to children, in fact Ruskin, like Dickens, works within a moral and philosophical tradition so that to develop the imagination is to develop a mature human mind. As Ruskin writes in Art of Old England: Lectures Given in Oxford, “for it is quite an inexorable law of this poor human nature of ours, that in the development of its healthy infancy, it is put by Heaven under the absolute necessity of using its imagination as well as its lungs and its legs”12, for him imagination is the most important thing in order to develop a child’s mind.
But surprisingly, one of the writers most directly influenced by Andersen was Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), “whose own fairy tales play more elaborately, sometimes less successfully, but always intriguingly on ideas, themes and motifs introduced by the Danish
author”.13 The two writers' tones of voice are sometimes indistinguishable. Like
Andersen, he often uses animals, plants and inanimate objects to express the affectation of officialdom, the limited world-view of the literati, and the bitter-sweet and often unrecognized sacrifices of the truly sensitive soul. Even though many are the stories written by Wilde that have several elements in common with Andersen’s fairy tales, for example "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", “The Remarkable Rocket”, “The Fisherman and His Soul” and "The Nightingale and the Rose”, it is worth pointing out that Wilde's stories are
12 J. RUSKIN, Art of Old England: Lectures Given in Oxford, 1889, London, Forgotten Books, 2013, p. 54. 13 J. BANERJEE, op. cit., p. 80.
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taken very seriously by the critics and only a few, notably "The Happy Prince" and "The Selfish Giant," are seen as tales specifically for children. They both appear in The Happy
Prince and Other Tales, a collection of stories for children first published in 1888. Both the
two stories contain a moral lesson for children, not to be too selfish, but to learn to be generous and altruist towards the others.
Apologhi smaglianti ma amari in maggior parte perché dietro al velo della fiaba si scagliano frecciate taglientissime all’organizzazione iniqua della società, all’egoismo umano ed all’ipocrisia di chi si crogiola nell’amor proprio e non vede i problemi degli altri… Il principe diventa cieco e depauperata dei suoi gioielli la statua è infine abbattuta ed il suo metallo fuso, e la rondine muore per compiere gli atti di generosità che il principe le ha richiesto, ma in cielo è grande la loro ricompensa. La notazione è naturalmente ironica perché i problemi vanno risolti in questo mondo. 14
Though the critic considers the “Happy Prince” a story for children, the intent of Wilde is also to teach them a moral lesson criticizing the society he belonged to and opening their eyes over the reality they live in: “E anche questo racconto verte sul tema della conoscenza della vita, della fine dell’età spensierata che apre gli occhi su una realtà tragica ed amara. Non è un dilemma morale quello che fronteggia il principe, ma la
scoperta delle ingiustizie a lui fino ad ora sconosciute che vi sono nel mondo”.15
The list of Victorian authors for children is definitely substantial and in order to have a full sight of the Victorian panorama we have to mention authors whose works are not so famous, although they contributed to enlarge the Victorian production of literature for children. One of them is Frederic William Farrar (1831-1903), a cleric of the Church of England and a school teacher. He wrote a book entitled Eric, or, Little by Little (1858), which deals with the descent into moral turpitude of a boy at a boarding school. The moral purpose here is crystal clear, as the author himself explains in the preface of the book: “The story of Eric was written with but one single object the vivid inculcation of inward purity and moral purpose, by the history of a boy who, in spite of the inherent nobility of his disposition, falls into all folly and wickedness, until he has learnt to seek
14 F.MARUCCI, op. cit., p. 884. 15 Ibidem, p. 884.
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help from above. I am deeply thankful to know from testimony public and private,
anonymous and acknowledged that this object has, by God’s blessing, been fulfilled”.16
Another of these writers is Juliana Horatia Ewing (1841-1885), whose works are notable for their sympathetic insight into children’s life and their reflection of her strong Anglican faith. “Jackanapes“ is surely one of her most famous stories for children; it is a wistful tale of heroic sacrifice in which the orphaned son of a Waterloo cavalry officer is brought up by his spinster aunt and eventually dies saving the life of his childhood friend on the field of battle. Although originally without illustrations when she published it in a 1879 issue of Aunt Judy's Magazine, the children's journal she edited, four years later it appeared as a slender, one-shilling volume with seventeen line illustrations by the noted artist Randolph Caldecott.
Another interesting tale is Jack Harkaway’ s one, the protagonist of the homonymous book by Hemyng Bracebridge (1841-1901). Jack Harkaway embodied the resourcefulness
and romantic adventurism of late nineteenth-century penny dreadful17 heroes.
A slight difference compared to the previous production can be found in Dinah Maria Mulock Craik’s works (1826-1887). The simple stories that Craik wrote for children reveal basic emotional patterns that satisfied her as a writer and a person. The sentimental writer's goal is to educate the emotions. Craik did not teach children how to behave by using rational arguments based on commandments. Nor did she try to scare them into morality by showing the sufferings of bad children. The sentimental story, instead, promotes habits of feeling; it arouses positive emotions and gives them plenty of exercise so that they will become strong and healthy. Craik published five more-or-less-realistic children's books between 1846 and 1855. In each, the protagonists are thrust into situations where their success depends largely on their own actions and where, more important, their happiness grows from the way other characters feel about them. The author's style was to stimulate positive feelings in her young readers so that they would be motivated to adopt socially correct actions in whatever circumstances they
16
R. B. SINGH, Goodly is Our Heritage: Children's Literature, Empire, and the Certitude of Character, Oxford, The Scarecrow Press Inc., 2004, p. 149
17
The penny dreadful was a nineteenth century publishing phenomenon. Penny dreadful is a pejorative term used to refer to cheap popular serial literature produced during the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom. The term typically referred to a story published in weekly parts, each costing one penny. The subject matter of these stories was typically sensational, focusing on the exploits of detectives, criminals, or supernatural entities. The penny dreadful stories were printed on cheap wood pulp paper and were aimed at young working class males.
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encountered. Her most famous books are: Michael the Miner (1846), which had details
about day-to-day life among the poor; The Little Lame Prince and his Travelling Cloak (1875), where the author shows how imagination can lead to empathy and enlightened morality; How to Win Love, or Rhoda's Lesson (1848), where the lesson the protagonist learns is to think first to the others; A Hero (1853), which dramatizes the everyday events of children's own lives: going on a trip, feeling timid in a new school, learning to row a boat, having a hat snatched and kicked around the schoolyard etc. and The Little Lychetts (1855), an interesting variation of the Cinderella tale. “In all these children's books Craik's system of ethics rests on the obligation to help and protect those weaker than oneself; she guides her readers to maturity by giving them opportunities to feel the glow of
approval and self-approval that comes from taking care of other people”.18
Belonging to the very last period of the Victorian age, Helen Beatrix Potter (1866-1943), is another English writer and illustrator, best known for her children's books featuring animals such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit, a children’s book illustrated by the writer herself. The tale was written in 1893 for five-year-old Noel Moore, son of Potter's former governess Annie Carter Moore, and first published in 1902. It tells the story of a disobedient rabbit, Peter, who doesn’t follow her mother advice cautioning him and his three rabbit sisters against entering a vegetable garden grown by a man named Mr. McGregor and he escapes from his burrow. After many dangerous adventures, the naughty rabbit returns home and is punished by his rabbit mother who gives him just a
chamomile tea for supper, while his three obedient and well-behaved rabbit sisters
receive a sumptuous dinner of milk and berries.
Illustration from The Tale of Peter Rabbit, by B. Potter. www.wikipedia.com
18 E. SHOWALTER, “Dinah Mulock Craik and the Tactics of Sentiment: A Case Study in Victorian Female
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VERSES, RHYMES, DOGGERELS AND LULLABIES: THE POETRY FOR CHILDREN
In addition to the huge production of novels, books and short stories dedicated to children, another way of teaching good morals and behaviours can be found in poetry. Many were the rhymes, poems, lullabies and doggerels dedicated to Victorian children. One of the most important author of the genre is indeed Lewis Carrol, who from the early age of thirteen, started writing poems for young children. One of his most notable work is
Useful and Instructive Poetry, a collection of instructive poetries, most of them with a
moral, written for his siblings. Another collection of poems is Phantasmagoria (1869), also published under the name Rhyme? And Reason? and Lewis Carroll's longest poem with its seven cantos between a ghost and a man named Tibbets.
The poetical production of Carroll is indeed huge and the list of poems and rhymes he wrote is very long, so I will limit myself mentioning the most important and significative poems. “The Jabberwocky” (1855) is considered one of the greatest nonsense poem written in English. It is about the killing of an animal called “Jabberwock” and it appears in
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Another notable nonsense poem
is “The Hunting of the Snark” (1874-76), which borrows many features from “The Jabberwocky”, like for instance a couple of nonsense words, some creatures and the setting. “The Walrus and the Carpenter” is a narrative poem which appears again in
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. It is recited in chapter four by
Tweedledum and Tweedledee to Alice and it is composed of eighteen stanzas, in an alternation of iambic trimeters and iambic tetrameters. The rhyming and rhythmical scheme used, as well as some archaisms and syntactical turns, are those of the traditional English ballad. To conclude, Carroll wrote also many poem parodies such as “Twinkle, twinkle little bat” (recited by the Mad Hatter in chapter seven of Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland), “You Are Old, Father William” and “How Doth the Little Crocodile?” (recited
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Illustration from You’re old father William, by John Tenniel. www.upload.wikimedia.org
www.jabberwocky.com www.singbookswithemily.files.wordpress.com
The Jabberwock in an illustration by John Tenniel. Illustration of the Mad Hatter reciting Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat, by J. Tenniel.
Another author who is worth citing is William Brightly Rands (1823-1882). Proclaimed “Laureate of the Nursery” by many, he was a prolific and versatile writer in several genres, but his largest output was probably in the field of essays and poems, some specifically for children. Much of his literary output consisted of contributions to evanescent periodicals, magazines and annuals, such as Good Words, Good Words for the
Young, Tom Hood’s Comic Annual and Strachan’s Annual. We know of more than one
hundred poems in this genre, but as most were originally published in these evanescent periodicals, we doubt whether all have been discovered. Many were the causes that brought some of his works to fall into obscurity, but surely one of them could be the fact he rarely wrote under his own name, using at least 30 pseudonyms. His best-known poems anyway, many of which were re-published in the popular 1899 Lilliput Lyrics with fine, humorous illustrations by Charles Robinson such as The Pedlar’ s Caravan and Great,
Wide, Beautiful, Wonderful World, are still known and loved by several generations,
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can in fact classify this genre as “poetry of wonder”. Rands was acutely aware of childhood fears as expressed, for instance, in The Rising, Watching Moon, where he describes a night scene where a child is afraid of the dark and the moon. The Tall Man, is a poem with a moral, describing a giant man who is punished for being too vain. Rands too wrote some nonsense poems, such as Topsy Turvey World, Nathan Nobb, Baby's
Bells and other funny doggerels just to entertain children and make them sing and dance,
like for example The Duck and Her Ducklings, where the children were supposed to shout in chorus reproducing the verse of a duck. “There was a duck which had three little ducks. Three little ducklings, chuck, chuck, chucks; She took them for a walk and she marched them back. And taught them how to say: “quack, quack, quack!”. Chorus: Quack, quack,
quack!”19
www.wbrands.com www.wbrands.com
Illustration from The Pedlar’s Caravan . Illustration from Great, Wide, Beautiful, Wonderful World.
Illustration from The Tall Man.www.wbrands.com
One of the greatest female writer of her age and considered the natural successor of the famous female poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Georgina Rossetti (1839-1894) was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems too. Her first volume of poetry was Goblin Market and Other Poems, published in 1862 which includes one of her most famous poem “Goblin Market”. Even though in public Rossetti often stated that the poem was intended for children, she herself was not
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actually writing for children during that period and she emphatically declined to contribute to a children’s book on the grounds that “children are not among my
suggestive subjects”20, in a letter to her publisher.
Whether Goblin Market was a story for children or not, surely it remains Rossetti’s most discussed poem. Critics have dismissed her protest that she intended no allegorical meaning and have interpreted in various ways her fairy tale of two sisters’ responses to the temptation of goblin fruit. Set in a fairy-tale world and exploring themes of temptation, sacrifice and salvation, it tells the story of a fraught encounter between sisters Laura and Lizzie and evil goblin merchants. Rossetti wrote this poem in 1859 while volunteering at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary for “fallen women” in Highgate. Biographers and critics have argued that the themes of temptation, sexual exchange and sisterly redemption in this poem are influenced by the poet’s experience working as an “associate Sister” at Highgate.
But Rossetti’s production also includes typical poems for children like, for instance,
Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book, first published by Routledge in 1872 and illustrated by
Arthur Hughes. Like many Victorian poems for children, some of Rossetti’s texts are primarily edifying, promoting patience or good manners while others are memory aids for learning about numbers, time, money, months, and colours. Most of the poems are evocative of the security of an ideal childhood, but others contains more serious subjects like the exploration of death and loss which brought some critics to question the appropriateness of these darker themes for the intended audience.
www.lisa-hager.pbworks.com www.flickr.com
Cover of Christina Rossetti’s first edition book, Illustration of one of the poems in Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book. by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti
20 C. ROSSETTI, The Letters of Christina Rossetti, ed. A. H. Harrison, Charlottesville, University Press of
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FROM AUDIENCE TO ACTORS: VICTORIAN CHILDREN AND THE THEATRE
With the flourishing of literature we also see the renovation of the theatre. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth many theatres were built along with theatre schools. Many were the theatres rebuilt and renovated, such as the Royalty, The Gaiety, The Charing Cross and The Globe. They displayed dramas relating to social problems and this attracted the interest of many people from different social classes. Many were the dramatists and playwrights during this period, one of the most important is without any doubt Oscar Wilde. But other writers tested themselves and put on scene their works. An example is the famous novel by Dickens Oliver Twist, represented for the first time on the stage at the Royal Pavilion Theatre in 1838, or his A Christmas Carol book, adapted and represented in 1877 with the aid of special technological effects. Even though most of the plays were addressed to adults, children’s participation was usually encouraged by them. Another author who brought his masterpiece, Alice Adventure’s in Wonderland, on stage was Lewis Carrol, as we have already seen in the previous chapter.
But children were not only spectators. Many, in fact, were the kids who started taking lessons in theatre’s academies to have a chance of performing on the stage: “Performers on domestic, amateur and professional stages, children assumed roles as diverse as Puck or an oyster-ghost, while as audience members they were deemed to hold strong views on the plot lines of pantomime and to have sufficient stamina to enjoy the full five hours
which a mixed bill could entail”.21 “By 1887 it was estimated that during the pantomime
season there were some 10,000 children working in theatres across the country”.22
Children were recruited even from the early age of three and people literally adored these juvenile performances. But, “in an era which became increasingly sentimental about its children, and protective towards them, the highly visible presence of juveniles on stage also ran counter to debates about the respectability of the acting profession as a
whole”.23 But why having such young children on the stage was so pleasant for the
Victorians? We can only make hypotheses. Maybe it was due to the already mentioned
21 A. VARTY, Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain: All Work, No Play, Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan
ed., 2008, p. 1.
22 Ibidem, p. 2. 23 Ibidem, p. 3.
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and explained “cult of the child”, which sees the children as symbols of innocence and purity. As A. Varty claims: “The infant appears to perform without self-consciousness, making no distinction between performance and play: it seems to perform for its own
pleasure rather than for an audience.”24
One might argue that children were requested as actors for they were less “expensive”, but this is questionable. “And whether star or supernumerary, their work was relatively well paid. Ellen Terry, reputedly eight years old, though really nine, was paid a salary of 30s as Puck in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at the Princess’s Theatre,
London in 1856”.25 Generally, wages for children under ten oscillated from 10s. a week
and 6 or 7d. at night. What is sure is that parents must have undoubtedly pushed their talented children to become actors and the reason is quite obvious.
Many children started their career at a very young age and became famous adult actors, such as Ellen Terry, who made her stage debut so young that not even she could remember and who, by the age of nine, was cast as Mamillius in A Winter’s Tale and quickly graduated to significant speaking roles, the most famous one as Puck in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream. Another one was the already mentioned Isa Bowman, who
played the Alice role in the 1888 representation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Many children, though forgotten today, worked equally long hours in the theatre, but did not go on to develop distinguished adult careers there. An example is Phoebe Carlo, “who played the first Alice in Savile Clarke’s dramatization of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1886 at the age of twelve. She had been performing since 1883 but abandoned her theatrical career shortly afterwards. The story of her stage life is traditionally told only in so far as it interacts with the work of Lewis Carroll, himself an ardent lover of juvenile performances. And even Phoebe Carlo’s work as Alice is often forgotten because it has
been upstaged by Isa Bowman”.26
24
Ibidem, p. 10.
25 Ibidem, p. 1. 26 Ibidem, p. 7.
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www.bl.uk www.bl.uk
Poster outside the Royal Pavilion Theatre. Poster of the representation of A Christmas Carol.
www.bl.uk
Ellen Terry on stage.
FANTASY LITERATURE AND LITERARY NONSENSE
It is not as easy as one might think to define fantasy literature or even fairy tale:
They are amorphous and ambiguous genres, whose boundaries are actually very difficult to set. What is certain, however, is that both fantasy and fairy tale literature have proved hugely popular with children. Indeed for many young readers, and critics, these genres are the core of
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children's literature. But the place of this kind of make-believe literature in children's culture has not always been secure, and it has a complex history.27
Historians of children’s books have often seen two forces in a constant competition: realism and didacticism on one hand, and fantasy and fun on the other one. But the line between fantasy and didacticism has always been blurred. We could label these new books “moral fairy tales”, defining them as mix between moralizing and fantasy elements. In the 18th and 19th century we can find many examples of these “hybrids”, beginning with a series called Moral Fairy Tales, which appeared in the 1820s or Christina Rossetti’s
Speaking Likenesses (1874), an imitation of Carroll’s Alice that provides reflections on the
behaviour of three little girls. By the end of the tales, the girls have been either rewarded or punished for their actions and dispositions. There are obvious comparisons with Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland, although Carroll’s fantasies are much less didactic. In spite of
the similarities to Alice, the stories had none of the humour or nonsense that contributed to the appeal of Carroll’s work and did not sell particularly well nor were re-printed.
Another preachy book to be taken as example is undoubtedly the already cited Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby (1863), one of the most famous of all children’s fantasies but also including substantial amounts of moralising elements and a large dose of social realism.
George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871) is another hybrid: part fairy-tale, part social realism, and part religious allegory. Like M. O. Grenby underlines, even Alice, if looked at in a certain light, can seem rather didactic even though the aim of the book is that of making the children escape from the cold and suffocating moralizing Victorian reality:
Carroll mocks the cautionary tale: the ‘nice little histories’ Alice has read, ‘about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if your hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds’. But Alice does learn as she goes through Wonderland and then the Looking-Glass world. After falling down the rabbit hole (a sort of birth) and wrestling with the Caterpillar’s interrogation about who she actually is, she gradually grows up, encountering small, cuddly creatures first, then scarier figures like the Duchess and the Queen, dealing with increasingly adult concerns (anger, death, judgment), and understanding how to comply with strange rituals
27 M.O.GRENBY, “Fantasy and Fairytale in Children's Literature”, in The British Library website, “Discovering
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like the croquet match. All the time she is gaining a stronger sense of herself until, at the end of the second book, she finally comes into her own by becoming a queen on the chessboard.28
In this literary overview, there is a genre we have not mentioned yet, of which Carroll is one of the most notable exponents, and that is the literary nonsense (or nonsense literature). It can be defined as a broad categorization of literature that balances elements that make sense with some that do not, with the effect of subverting language conventions or logical reasoning. The effect of nonsense is often caused by an excess of meaning, rather than a lack of it. It comes from a combination of two artistic sources: an older one, which is the oral folk tradition (games, songs, dramas, and rhymes); and a newer one, which is typical of court poets, scholars, and intellectuals of various kinds. Nonsense texts are easily recognizable by the presence of constant features, techniques and devices such as: faulty cause and effect, neologisms, reversals and inversions, simultaneity, picture/text incongruity, arbitrariness, infinite repetition, negativity or mirroring and imprecision (including gibberish). Nonsense is distinct from fantasy, though there are sometimes resemblances between them. The main distinction lies in the fact that everything follows logic within the rules of the fantasy world whereas the nonsense world has no comprehensive system of logic at all. Fantasy worlds employ the presence of magic to logically explain the impossible. In nonsense literature, magic is rare but when it does occur, its nonsensical nature only adds to the mystery rather than logically explaining anything. If nonsense literature gives the impression of unreality, this is not because it presents unreality, but simply because it offers readers aspects of reality that overwhelm their conventional power of absorption. The revision or transformation of rules leads to the formation of a new set of comic and playful rules that govern the production and interpretation of nonsense literature. Nonsense is a product of a sophisticated literary culture rather than an archaic style produced by dreams and madness. “To judge a nonsense text by the standards of real fiction is to marginalise it, reducing it to mere eccentricity through a mistaken critical focus which fails to take account of the illuminating parallel of the nonsense tradition in literature”29 and this is what happened in the Victorian age, when critics tried to define this particular genre.
28
Ibidem, p. 6.
29 H. KHASAWNEH, The Poetics of Literary Nonsense: Victorian Nonsense and its Resurgence in The Irish
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It is important to notice that nonsense was influenced by the unconscious. Psychological critics have achieved some interesting insights concerning nonsense, but they tend to treat their psychological interpretations as the only authoritative reading without paying enough attention to the literary work itself so that they fail to capture the complexity of nonsense. Nevertheless, there is a similarity between dream work and nonsense work. There is a similarity between Sigmund Freud’s view in The Interpretation
of Dreams that dreams have double meanings (latent and manifest) and his view of how
images function (signifiers and signifieds). Well, nonsense writing can somehow be considered similar to dreaming, since it involves the processes of regression, displacement and secondary elaboration. Dream vision is essentially fluid; nothing is reliable and anything can change into anything else. The result is that dreams cannot be controlled and cannot be played with, while nonsense balances the multiplicity of meaning with the absence of meaning that is maintained by playing with the rules of language, logic and representation.
One of the biggest exponents of Victorian nonsense literature, together with Carroll but his predecessor, is Edward Lear (1812-1888). He was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet. But first of all he was the “father of nonsense”, since the genre started with him and he was well-known from the very beginning thanks to his
“limericks”.30 His Book of Nonsense, a collection of limericks, nonsensical alphabets,
rhymes, portraits and cookery, appeared for the first time in 1846. That the intended audience of Lear’s nonsense were children is clear from the title page. The illustration shows the adult Derry handing his book, a metaphor of didacticism, to some delighted children. The adult dancing amidst children signifies that he has given up authority and become a child.
Illustration of the Book of Nonsense. www.html2-f.scribdassets.com
30
A limerick is a form of poetry, especially one in five-line, with a strict rhyme scheme (AABBA), which is sometimes obscene with humorous intent. The first, second and fifth lines are usually longer than the third and fourth.
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But the alienation of the writer is the real subject of this book with its catalogue of eccentric individuals many of whom suffer the hostility and often violent reactions of the public world. This might be due to the fact that Lear was homosexual, depressed and suffered from epileptic fits. Not surprisingly he felt he was an outcast. He lived his life in solitude and in a deep state of unhappiness, but, as Carroll did, he used to cheer up when he was with children. Lear’s nonsense came from his travels to the East, particularly India. Many of his nonsense words were formed out of his familiarity with the native languages of the places he visited.
In The Pussycat and the Owl, the Freudian implications of sexuality and the fear of sexual inadequacy are obvious. Here, in fact, Lear incarnates the character of a weird creature with a long and luminous nose, who suffers by falling in love with a girl. Lear’s
long nose acquires a psychological significance and in the comic illustration, the phallic
symbolism is unmistakable:
There was an Old Man with a nose, Who said, 'If you choose to suppose, That my nose is too long,
You are certainly wrong!
That remarkable Man with a nose.31
The Old Man projects his own fear, pain and guilt onto the frightened children. www.html1-f.scribdassets.com
Lear’s self-portrait, How Pleasant to Know Mr Lear, is an invitation to join him in his pleasant enterprise of rejecting the gloomy world and to enjoy the festival universe of nonsense. In fact he viewed the surrounding world as gloomy and melancholy. “My own life”, he mourned, “seems to me more and more unsatisfactory and melancholy and
31 E. LEAR, “There Was an Old Man With a Nose”, in One Hundred Nonsense Pictures and Rhymes: Written
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dark” and “when I go to heaven, if indeed I go, and am surrounded by thousands of polite angels, I shall say courteously ‘please leave me alone, you are doubtless all delightful, but
I do not wish to become acquainted with you’ ”.32 These limericks are characterised by
the formula of “there was an[old/young/man/lady/person] of [place name]”. This form is echoed in the final line, while the middle lines usually describe an eccentric situation and the response to it by the people around him or her.
Another example of text which violates the reader’s expectations is Lear’s Nonsense
Cookery, and in particular the “Gosky Patties” recipe, in which we are told the necessary
ingredients and the unreasonable things to do with them but significantly we are advised to forget about cookery, in other words leaving the reader’s expectations unfulfilled: “Nonsense cookery and Carroll’s White Knight’s pudding that is made of blotting-paper and gun-powder, demonstrate that no relationship is allowed to develop between parts;
rather they are examples of a whole compiled as the sum of the parts”.33
Lear’s nonsense is characterised by mocking conventional meanings, taking delight in the sounds and rhythms of words and verbal inventions; in fact his nonsense celebrates the rhythms of language more than its systematic meanings. Lear’s genius was to bring nonsense, which prospered through oral transmission in nursery rhymes, into a literary fold. His nonsense verse combines the pleasant sound effects of nursery rhymes sounding more melodic and musical and differing from Carroll’s linguistic nonsense, which makes no use of nursery rhymes being all about words. Flowers, insects, animals, legs of mutton, Christmas puddings, playing cards and chessmen can speak. Lear also permits animals and objects to speak, but he does not carry the process so far as Carroll. The nonsense of Lear and Carroll shares some characteristics but there are still substantial differences.
Carroll’s nonsense is logical and thus more complicated than Lear’s emotional nonsense. Such a difference parallels the difference between Lear’s and Carroll’s temperaments. While Carroll was a sort of “nonsense creator”, sophisticated in its quality because it focuses on playing with language and logic, Lear, on the other hand, was motivated by his desperate feelings of loneliness and despair. Carroll as a logician manipulates mathematical rules to produce humour. His nonsense contains puns, riddles
32
E. LEAR, The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, New York, Dover Publications Inc., 1951, cit. in H. KHASAWNEH, op. cit., p. 68.
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and plays with logic that are lacking in Lear. We can doubtless affirm that Lear’s Book of
Nonsense and all his other texts are a landmark in the history of juvenile literature.
As we have already noticed, Lear didn’t have an easy life, especially as for relationships. Lear’s most fervent and painful friendship involved Franklin Lushington, whom he fell in love with without being loved back. Although they remained friends for almost forty years, until Lear’s death, the disparity of their feelings for one another constantly tormented Lear. Indeed, none of Lear’s attempts at male companionship was successful; the very intensity of Lear’s affections seemingly doomed the relationships. This could be one of the reasons why he relied on correspondents and friend for companions. His only trusted companion was perhaps his beloved cat Foss, immortalised in seven sketches entitled “The Heraldic Blazon Of Foss The Cat”.
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