| This month marks the fifth anniversary of my blog, which explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws some occasional shade at the modern academy. The introductory post is here. My "six simple questions for academics" post is here. Spoilers abound in my discussion of these forgotten novels, and I discuss 18th-century attitudes which I do not necessarily endorse. |
CMP#229 Three children's books--one plot. Also, who influenced whom?
The Village School, William Henry Knight, detail In my previous post, I looked at two books for children, published by two different authors, both featuring a spoiled young West Indian heiress coming to England and correcting her behaviour after receiving judicious instruction from her host family. These two books are examples of a then-popular genre for children's books, which combined morally improving narratives with inset fables, scientific discourses, dialogue, and history lectures. As I mentioned, a book by Thomas Day, Sandford and Merton, was an outstandingly popular exemplar of this genre.
According to scholar Peter Rowland, Sandford and Merton was published in three volumes in 1783, 1786 and 1789 and quickly gained such popularity that “the next instalment was eagerly and impatiently awaited by a legion of small readers.” The book was reprinted for over a hundred years but it is now largely forgotten.
As Rowland describes the premise, "rebellious Tommy Merton, the spoilt son of a wealthy plantation owner from Jamaica, and his friend Harry Sandford, the poor but worthy son of a local farmer, are patiently educated by the Reverend Mr. Barlow... Master Tommy is brought, by precept and self-discovery, to see the error of this ways. A host of interpolated stories [are included], providing introductions to ancient history, astronomy, biology, science, exploration and geography” to which I would add the book includes moral fables in which kindness is always rewarded and cruelty is punished.
Rowland points out that Thomas Day based Sandford and Merton on the educational philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; for example, Tommy’s tutor starts teaching him to read only after Tommy himself requests to be taught. Letting the child take the lead seems rather peculiar when we consider that it was routine to beat an education into boys at this time. Reverend Barlow is nothing like the typical switch-wielding schoolmaster, and many school boys must have wished they could have been educated along the lines depicted in Sandford and Merton.
According to scholar Peter Rowland, Sandford and Merton was published in three volumes in 1783, 1786 and 1789 and quickly gained such popularity that “the next instalment was eagerly and impatiently awaited by a legion of small readers.” The book was reprinted for over a hundred years but it is now largely forgotten.
As Rowland describes the premise, "rebellious Tommy Merton, the spoilt son of a wealthy plantation owner from Jamaica, and his friend Harry Sandford, the poor but worthy son of a local farmer, are patiently educated by the Reverend Mr. Barlow... Master Tommy is brought, by precept and self-discovery, to see the error of this ways. A host of interpolated stories [are included], providing introductions to ancient history, astronomy, biology, science, exploration and geography” to which I would add the book includes moral fables in which kindness is always rewarded and cruelty is punished.
Rowland points out that Thomas Day based Sandford and Merton on the educational philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; for example, Tommy’s tutor starts teaching him to read only after Tommy himself requests to be taught. Letting the child take the lead seems rather peculiar when we consider that it was routine to beat an education into boys at this time. Reverend Barlow is nothing like the typical switch-wielding schoolmaster, and many school boys must have wished they could have been educated along the lines depicted in Sandford and Merton.
"And which way is she gone?" "Sir, I don't choose to tell you." Egalitarian message
Sandford and Merton also features great sympathy for the poor along with a heaping helping of contempt for the upper classes. In the scene depicted at left, Harry refuses to tell a haughty local squire which way the hare he was hunting had run, and takes a whipping for it.
When Tommy's father asks Rev. Barlow to undertake his education, Mr. Barlow replies bluntly: “Gentlemen in your situation of life are accustomed to divide the world into two general classes; those who are persons of fashion, and those who are not… their manners, their prejudices, their very vices, must be inculcated upon the minds of children… the second [class of mankind]… are represented as being only objects of contempt and disgust, and scarcely worthy to be put on a footing with the very beasts that contribute to the pleasure and convenience of their superiors.”
Tommy’s father protests that although he and his wife “wished their son to have the manners of a man of fashion, they thought his morals and religion of infinitely more consequence.”
“If you think so, sir," said Mr. Barlow, “it is more than a noble lord did, whose written opinions are now considered as the oracles of polite life.” Mr. Barlow is referring, I think, to Lord Chesterfield and his famous letters of advice to his son.
The message throughout is that "gentlemen" do not deserve any special deference, compared to honest yeomen. Once Tommy overcomes his aversion to doing any manual labour, he and Harry try to make a fire with flint, build a wattle-and-daub house through trial and error, and start their own orchard and vegetable garden.
Generations of parents approved of Sandford and Merton for its homilies about living a simple and virtuous life and rejecting materialism. Says Rowland, “parents everywhere felt it their bounden duty to ensure that their children read it.”
Sandford and Merton also features great sympathy for the poor along with a heaping helping of contempt for the upper classes. In the scene depicted at left, Harry refuses to tell a haughty local squire which way the hare he was hunting had run, and takes a whipping for it.
When Tommy's father asks Rev. Barlow to undertake his education, Mr. Barlow replies bluntly: “Gentlemen in your situation of life are accustomed to divide the world into two general classes; those who are persons of fashion, and those who are not… their manners, their prejudices, their very vices, must be inculcated upon the minds of children… the second [class of mankind]… are represented as being only objects of contempt and disgust, and scarcely worthy to be put on a footing with the very beasts that contribute to the pleasure and convenience of their superiors.”
Tommy’s father protests that although he and his wife “wished their son to have the manners of a man of fashion, they thought his morals and religion of infinitely more consequence.”
“If you think so, sir," said Mr. Barlow, “it is more than a noble lord did, whose written opinions are now considered as the oracles of polite life.” Mr. Barlow is referring, I think, to Lord Chesterfield and his famous letters of advice to his son.
The message throughout is that "gentlemen" do not deserve any special deference, compared to honest yeomen. Once Tommy overcomes his aversion to doing any manual labour, he and Harry try to make a fire with flint, build a wattle-and-daub house through trial and error, and start their own orchard and vegetable garden.
Generations of parents approved of Sandford and Merton for its homilies about living a simple and virtuous life and rejecting materialism. Says Rowland, “parents everywhere felt it their bounden duty to ensure that their children read it.”
The runaway financial success of Sandford and Merton was an invitation to other authors to follow suit with imitations and variations. How about a spoiled girl instead of a spoiled boy, like the two books discussed in my previous post? How about a nice West Indian sent to live with some spoiled English kids? A prolific author known to us only as “A. Selwyn” reversed the personalities in this way. In The Young Creoles (1825), the gentle and timid Francis and Blanche arrive in England as orphans and are taken into their uncle’s home. Their unruly cousins lure Francis’ youthful black servant Juba into the back yard and pelt him with snowballs. Francis protests on Juba’s behalf, but his cousins sneer: “if we had a little fun with seeing blackey skipping in the snow, I can’t see what concern it is of your’s; particularly, as he do’n’t belong to you, and a’n’t your slave the moment he sets his foot on English ground.”
“His not being my slave,’ said Francis, ‘don’t make him your’s’; for I don’t think the poor fellow would wish to change masters.”
Francis and Blanche are portrayed as weak and enervated, owing to growing up in a tropical climate. This is a common trope, although the heroine of The Woman of Colour is an exception in that regard. This stereotype turns our thoughts again to the mystery of Miss Lambe, the "chilly and tender" "half-mulatto" who was to play a role in Jane Austen’s unfinished last novel Sanditon. Was she going to be fretful and entitled like Matilda in The Barbadoes Girl, or gentle and easily imposed upon, like Blanche?
“His not being my slave,’ said Francis, ‘don’t make him your’s’; for I don’t think the poor fellow would wish to change masters.”
Francis and Blanche are portrayed as weak and enervated, owing to growing up in a tropical climate. This is a common trope, although the heroine of The Woman of Colour is an exception in that regard. This stereotype turns our thoughts again to the mystery of Miss Lambe, the "chilly and tender" "half-mulatto" who was to play a role in Jane Austen’s unfinished last novel Sanditon. Was she going to be fretful and entitled like Matilda in The Barbadoes Girl, or gentle and easily imposed upon, like Blanche?
Little Fanny is intimidated upon her arrival at Mansfield Park Did Austen influence Hofland?
A well-known Austen scholar has recently surmised that The Barbadoes Girl was inspired by Mansfield Park; that is, she suggests that Barbara Hofland inverted the story of Fanny Price, a virtuous waif who goes to live with her haughty cousins, to create her tale about a haughty orphan who goes to live with her virtuous cousins. Further, since Mansfield Park’s anti-slavery message is muted (to say the least), she also suggested that Barbara Hofland decided to amplify the abolitionist message in The Barbadoes Girl as a reaction to Austen’s reticence in Mansfield Park.
Since there are so many examples of the displaced waif in the literature of this time, I don’t see a compelling case for drawing a direct line from Austen’s novel to Hofland’s children’s book. And since Eliza Kirkham Mathews used the same premise when she wrote The Young West Indian before Mansfield Park was published in 1814, we can be certain that her iteration was not inspired by Austen’s novel. Fanny’s question about the slave trade could not have inspired EKM to add a scene where Miss Mountford beat her maid, and by extension I doubt Austen had anything to do with Matilda throwing a glass of beer in her servant’s face in The Barbadoes Girl.
We can find many examples of novels written before and during Austen's day which condemned slavery more emphatically and more explicitly than Austen. There is no evidence that Austen's omission of a strong anti-slavery message impelled anyone else to include one.
Furthermore, it's surprising how few people have grappled with the fact that, at the end of Persuasion, the narrator commends Captain Wentworth for helping the widowed Mrs. Smith regain her lost income from the West Indies, without a hint of disapproval that the money is blood-soaked: Mrs. Smith's "recent good offices by Anne had been enough in themselves, and their marriage, instead of depriving her of one friend, secured her two. She was their earliest visitor in their settled life; and Captain Wentworth, by putting her in the way of recovering her husband’s property in the West Indies, by writing for her, acting for her, and seeing her through all the petty difficulties of the case with the activity and exertion of a fearless man and a determined friend, fully requited the services which she had rendered, or ever meant to render, to his wife."
I am not saying that we should assume Austen was indifferent about slavery. In fact, I am willing to stipulate that she opposed slavery, just as her brothers did. But she did not choose to make it a central feature of her novels.
A well-known Austen scholar has recently surmised that The Barbadoes Girl was inspired by Mansfield Park; that is, she suggests that Barbara Hofland inverted the story of Fanny Price, a virtuous waif who goes to live with her haughty cousins, to create her tale about a haughty orphan who goes to live with her virtuous cousins. Further, since Mansfield Park’s anti-slavery message is muted (to say the least), she also suggested that Barbara Hofland decided to amplify the abolitionist message in The Barbadoes Girl as a reaction to Austen’s reticence in Mansfield Park.
Since there are so many examples of the displaced waif in the literature of this time, I don’t see a compelling case for drawing a direct line from Austen’s novel to Hofland’s children’s book. And since Eliza Kirkham Mathews used the same premise when she wrote The Young West Indian before Mansfield Park was published in 1814, we can be certain that her iteration was not inspired by Austen’s novel. Fanny’s question about the slave trade could not have inspired EKM to add a scene where Miss Mountford beat her maid, and by extension I doubt Austen had anything to do with Matilda throwing a glass of beer in her servant’s face in The Barbadoes Girl.
We can find many examples of novels written before and during Austen's day which condemned slavery more emphatically and more explicitly than Austen. There is no evidence that Austen's omission of a strong anti-slavery message impelled anyone else to include one.
Furthermore, it's surprising how few people have grappled with the fact that, at the end of Persuasion, the narrator commends Captain Wentworth for helping the widowed Mrs. Smith regain her lost income from the West Indies, without a hint of disapproval that the money is blood-soaked: Mrs. Smith's "recent good offices by Anne had been enough in themselves, and their marriage, instead of depriving her of one friend, secured her two. She was their earliest visitor in their settled life; and Captain Wentworth, by putting her in the way of recovering her husband’s property in the West Indies, by writing for her, acting for her, and seeing her through all the petty difficulties of the case with the activity and exertion of a fearless man and a determined friend, fully requited the services which she had rendered, or ever meant to render, to his wife."
I am not saying that we should assume Austen was indifferent about slavery. In fact, I am willing to stipulate that she opposed slavery, just as her brothers did. But she did not choose to make it a central feature of her novels.
About Thomas Day (1748-1789)
Thomas Day was a wealthy and childless British eccentric who somehow wrote an enduring children's classic. His biographer Wendy Moore says Sandford and Merton "was reprinted 140 times by 1870" and "launched an entire new genre in adventure books for boys," I should think that even Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Little Men owes something to Sandford and Merton. Day himself conducted an extraordinary experiment in education: he selected two pretty girls from the Foundling Home with a view to training them up to be an ideal wife (he intended to marry the "winner"). He did eventually find a pious and devoted wife, but I suspect that he was infertile because of the childhood bout of smallpox which left his face severely pock-marked. Judging by his bizarre and hostile relations with women, I also wonder whether he had problems with having healthy relations at all, if you get my drift. At any rate, he was also a zealous philanthropist and abolitionist, which should count for something. Today he would no doubt be set down as neurodivergent.
Wendy Moore's book, How to Create the Perfect Wife is the compelling story of Day and his friends--I had no idea that Maria Edgeworth's father was such an eccentric. Really, this story is stranger than fiction.
Thomas Day was a wealthy and childless British eccentric who somehow wrote an enduring children's classic. His biographer Wendy Moore says Sandford and Merton "was reprinted 140 times by 1870" and "launched an entire new genre in adventure books for boys," I should think that even Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Little Men owes something to Sandford and Merton. Day himself conducted an extraordinary experiment in education: he selected two pretty girls from the Foundling Home with a view to training them up to be an ideal wife (he intended to marry the "winner"). He did eventually find a pious and devoted wife, but I suspect that he was infertile because of the childhood bout of smallpox which left his face severely pock-marked. Judging by his bizarre and hostile relations with women, I also wonder whether he had problems with having healthy relations at all, if you get my drift. At any rate, he was also a zealous philanthropist and abolitionist, which should count for something. Today he would no doubt be set down as neurodivergent.
Wendy Moore's book, How to Create the Perfect Wife is the compelling story of Day and his friends--I had no idea that Maria Edgeworth's father was such an eccentric. Really, this story is stranger than fiction.
| Boulukos, George. The Grateful Slave : The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2008. Rowland, Peter. “Unwelcome Company: Thumbs Down for Sandford and Merton.” The Wildean : Journal of the Oscar Wilde Society, no. 38, 2011, pp. 44–53. Thank you to the Special Collection librarians at the University of Iowa. |
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