I’ve recently been re-reading some of
the Puritan stories for children about the deaths of children who have been
favoured by God, including the most famous examples featured in James Janeway’s
A Token for Children (1671-22). Now
that this project has sharpened my focus on how readers are represented, it
strikes me that these offer the earliest examples of ambivalent representations
of readers in children’s literature. “Ambivalent” might be too kind a term, for
there is something deeply disturbing about the way these children – figures we
are intended to admire and emulate – read. What they are reading is, of course,
the Bible and other “good” books; doing so makes these “good” children who are
granted “good” deaths. But even allowing for the distortions of presentism, it
is hard not to see these readers are irritating. Let me give you some examples.
Janeway’s third paragon
is Mary, “a little Girl that was wrought upon, when she was between Four and
Five years Old”. Mary is a great reader, and at several points Janeway
describes what and how she reads.
Her book was her delight and what she did read, she loved to
make her own […] and many times she was so strangely affected in reading of the
Scriptures, that she would burst out into Tears, and would hardly be pacified….
She was very Conscious in keeping the Sabbath, spending the
whole time in Reading or Praising, or learning her Catechism, or teaching her
Brethren and Sisters…
Mary didn’t just read or confine her
teaching to her siblings; she gathered together local children in the
neighbourhood and told them how to spend their Sundays. You don’t get any sense
that they appreciated her counsel.
Like Mary, most of
Janeway’s child paragons are dedicated readers of the Bible who have clearly
not mastered the art of silent reading. They weep and groan and expostulate to
such an extent that in the case of one little boy who “When he was left at home
alone upon the Sabbath days, he would be sure not to spend any part of the day
in idleness & Play, but busied in praying, reading in the Bible, and
getting of his Catechism,” a neighbour is driven to complain about the way the
he is carrying on.
Previously I had
assumed that the first question marks about how readers are represented to
children were placed around readers who were reading the wrong kinds of texts
or reading them in the wrong way, but my return to these very early texts is
making me think again….
No comments:
Post a Comment