English childhood; Wordsworth's treatment of childhood in the light of English poetry from Prior to Crabbe

Front matter

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Preface

The following essays are based on a dissertation presented for the doctorate in Columbia University. The aim has been to present Wordsworth's rather extensive body of poetry on childhood in its true perspective against the background of eighteenth-century poetry.

In addition to many detached poems on childhood I have used innumerable interesting lines imbedded in poems on subjects remotely or not at all connected with childhood. Such incidental lines, in addition to their occasional charm, are essential for an understanding of the attitude of poets of the eighteenth century toward childhood.

I owe thanks to the Librarian of Columbia University and to Miss Mudge of the library staff for assistance in procuring books and manuscripts; to my wife, for careful reading of proof; to Professor W. P. Trent and Professor E. H. Wright, who read several of the essays ; and especially to Professor C. S. Baldwin, who read the entire manuscript and made constructive suggestions of inestimable value.

The essays had their inception in the English Seminar conducted by Professor Ashley Horace Thorndike, whose wide scholarship has been at the same time an inspiration and an invaluable guide in shaping the discussion of the large body of material which represents the accumulated effort of a century on the subject of childhood. To him I am deeply grateful for countless suggestions, always patiently and kindly given.

A. C. B.

New York, November 7, 1922. vii

Contents

PAGE

Introduction i

I. In Our Infancy 15

Introduction

The aim in the following chapters is to study Wordsworth's treatment of childhood in the light of English poetry from Matthew Prior to George Crabbe. For a true appreciation of Wordsworth's attitude it is essential to know the place of childhood in the poetry of the eighteenth century.

It is not the intention to review juvenile literature. The object is not to evaluate poetry composed by children or for them. No peculiar value is attached to the precocious verse of Pope, Chatterton, or Wordsworth himself. In fact, unless their precocious verse incorporates lines on childhood, it has no place within the limits of this study.

In the eighteenth century may be observed the beginnings of many modern conceptions in poetry as well as in politics, theology, education, and social welfare. This is especially true with respect to interest in childhood. In order to understand the poet's treatment of childhood in an age of changing values, it is necessary to take into account various influences that made themselves felt in the lives and thoughts of English men and women as well as in English poetry. Earliest of these is Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which persists as a moulding force throughout the century wherever the education of children is discussed. Shaftesbury's Characteristics is a definite influence from Thomson to Wordsworth. After the middle of the century there are traces, often tangible, of ideas which derive from Rousseau's Entile; and the effects of Revolutionary speculation and social philosophy on the conceptions of Blake are obvious in his poems about children. The industrial revolution, moreover, offered new problems with regard to child labor, problems akin to those noticed in poetry as early as John Dyer's The Fleece. The problem, then, is not merely literary. In so far as poets have touched upon education and social welfare it will be helpful for an understanding of their aims to observe the conflict between old and new forces, and the emergence of modern conceptions in the schools and in the attitude of the public toward children.

Certain themes that are prominent in Wordsworth emerge faintly at first in the work of minor poets who are seldom read now except by students of literature. These ignes minores, in whose poetry there is not often grandeur or height, indicate more or less clearly the changes that took place in life and in poetry. The student can not, like Bums, pass by "hunders nameless" poets and versifiers who imitated their betters, but who prepared the way at the same time for inspired poets like Blake and Wordsworth. Their poetry is vital in a study that reflects forces which ultimately brought about epoch-making changes in the attitude of men towards children in the home, in the school, and in industry.

Although no hard-and-fast delimitation of the years that constitute childhood is necessary for the purpose of this study, it will be helpful to observe the ages of children as stated by men of letters themselves. Age is sometimes specifically noted in the title, as in Prior's To A Child of Quality (Hve years old, 1704, the author then forty). More often the poet merely alludes to the child's age, with the result that it is difficult to determine the exact boundaries set for infancy, childhood, or youth. Cowper's To My

Cousin Anne Bodham recalls her as no more 'Than plaything for a nurse" ; she was "A kitten both in size and glee." While comparing the ages of children in The Excursion (III, 592-94), Wordsworth states thait there was

no wider interval of time Between their several births than served for one To establish something of a leader's sway.

The line between infancy and childhood is usually vaguely suggested, as in The Excursion, by stating that the boy had ''overpast the sinless age." Beattie is not specific in the prefatory remarks to The Minstrel: his "design was to trace the progress of a Poetical Genius, born in a rude age, from the first dawning of fancy and reason till that period at which he may be supposed capable of appearing in the world as a Minstrel."

The paragraphs of Isaac Watts in the first half and those of Rousseau after the middle of the century make it possible to construct a schedule of ages. For Watts the years up to four constituted infancy; from four to eight, early childhood; from eight to twelve, childhood; and after that, youth. Rousseau carried infancy to the fifth year; childhood to the twelfth ; boyhood to the fifteenth ; and youth to the twentieth year.

In Birth and Education of Genius, James Cawthorn approximates Watts's age of four as closing the period of infancy :

And Genius now 'twixt three and four, Phoebus, according to the rule, Resolved to send his son to school.

Wordsworth, on the other hand, holds closer to Rousseau's age of five: at the age when Luke carried in his cheeks "Two steady roses that were five years old," Michael first made a shepherd's staff for him. Aaron Hill's The Distinction of Ages had carried the first period up to the seventh year:

The seven first years of life (man's break of day). Gleams of short sense, a dawn of thought display.

The ninth year was frequently chosen as the close of childhood. Swift states in the Modest Proposal: *T have no children by which I can propose to get a single penny, the youngest being nine years old." Richardson wrote in Clarissa Harlozve: "She never was left out of any party of pleasure after she had passed her ninth year." In one of the numerous letters in which he shows a true fatherly tenderness for his son Philip Stanhope, Chesterfield reminds the boy of his ninth birthday, after which he will no longer be a child. Wordsworth is less precise in The Prelude. He speaks of himself as "a child not nine years old," and many of his recollections cluster about the period between nine and ten in phrases like "Ere I had told ten birthdays," "twice five summers," and "twice five years or less." In Michael the tenth year marks a period ; at that age, when Luke was "full ten years old" and was able to stand against the mountain blasts, Michael and his son were companions.

Although it is clear that they were using the word "childhood" without strict regard for age, there is no real inconsistency among poets in their notice of these varying ages as markers of infancy and childhood. Modern child psychology holds that "childhood is usually considered to cover the period between infancy and puberty, or, roughly, between the ages of 3 and 12" ; but it also recognizes an overlapping of periods when tests are applied to determine physical, emotional, or intellectual development.^ In the

^ A Cyclopedia of Education, edited by Paul Monroe, s. v. "Child Psychology."

lines recalling his boyhood friend, Wordsworth felt free to change the reading of 1805, "ere he was ten years old", to

This boy was taken from his mates, and died

In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old. ^

While discussing charity children in his History of the Poor (1793), Thomas Ruggles seems to suggest that thirteen or fourteen was considered the close of childhood, at which time the boy was expected to go to work. Mickle refers to this transition in Commodore Johnstone :

As childhood closed, thy ceaseless toils began, And toils and dangers ripened thee to man.

Transition seems to be indicated by Aaron Hill in The Distinction of Ages:

When fourteen springs have bloomed his downy cheek, His soft and blushful meanings learn to speak.

In Ecclesiastical Sonnets (III, 23) Wordsworth gives solemn expression to his regret that childhood can not be extended beyond the age of Confirmation.

The Young-ones gathered in from hill and dale.

With holiday delight on every brow :

'Tis past away ; far other thoughts prevail ;

For they are taking the baptismal Vow

Upon their conscious selves; their own lips speak

The solemn promise. Strongest sinews fail.

And many a blooming, many a lovely, cheek

Under the holy fear of God turns pale;

While on each head his lawn-robed servant lays

An apostolic hand, and with prayer seals

1 See There zvas a Boy (1798), in Knight, Poems of William Wordsworth, Macmillan, 1896, vol. II, page 58, footnote.

The Covenant. The Omnipotent will raise Their feeble Souls; and bear with hi'- regrets, Who, looking round the fair assemblage, feels That ere the Sun goes down their childhood sets. ^

II

Although the lines of Catullus, Martial, and Horace on childhood are echoed in English poetry from Ben Jonson to Pope and Gray, the limits of this study forbid even a brief survey of childhood as it is noted in the Greek and Latin literatures. It would, likewise, be i^^^ossible to do justice to memorable passages in the Oi ^"'^""

Testament, and to the many beautiful m .jiics ui

the Virgin and Child, the spirit of which is more or less faithfully preserved in such anonymous songs of universal appeal to the mother heart as My Sweet Sweeting, or Lully, lulla, thou little tiny child, and the homely lyric

Fayre maydyn, who is this barn, That thou beriste in thyn arme?

Neither does space allow even a glance at childhood as it is frequently noticed elsewhere in Middle English literature, for example in the Brome miracle play Abraham and Isaac, in Chaucer's penetrating lines, and in the Popular Ballads.

1 Compare The Act, The Preservation of the Health and Morals of Apprentices and Others Employed in Cotton and Other Mills, and Cotton and Other Factories : June 22, 1802. One hour each Sunday should be given to teaching the Christian religion, and Confirmation should take place between the fourteenth and eighteenth years. It seems clear that Confirmation has been delayed beyond the usual age of twelve or fourteen, probably because of industrial' abuses of child labor. Schedule C of the Act, for better regulation of parish poor children within bills of mortality, passed in 1766, shows that children were at work as early as the age of six. It specifies : "Where sent if past Six Years of Age, and in what work employed."

It is, however, n'=^cessary to glance at the poetry of the seventeenth century. The appealing child lyrics in the period from the Earl of Surrey's The Age of Children Happiest to Henry Vaughan's The Retreate have no parallels at the close oi the seventeenth century.

Surrey's pensive mood does not prevent a frankly human approach to his subject. Sir Philip Sidney's Child-Song is not colored by moral or theological intentions : Sidney's attitude toward the infant who can not sleep, although his mother sings to,, him, is almost whimsical and, certainly, human. Nichola|>I Breton's A Sweet Lullaby with rare grace and •' ^(depicts a mother tenderly singing to her

child about the lather who "false is fled away." Robert Greene's Sephestia's Song to Her Child (from Menuphon) has all the charm, tender humanity, and lilt of Elizabethan lyrics on childhood.

Much of the charm of these lyrics survives in Jonson's child poems, which, however, begin to show traces of new literary methods characteristic of the classicist school. Although his lyrics reveal a conscious striving for formal beauty, Jonson is still close to the Elizabethan mood. His lines On My First Daughter, On My First Son, and An Epitaph on Salathiel Pavy breathe true parental tenderness. In these poems the personal attitude allows the expression of genuine sentiments. The last line of the poem on his daughter echoes a classical convention, but the father's heart is in the poem. For so genuine an expression of parental grief as is found in the lines On My First Son, the reader of poetry must wait more than one hundred years after Jonson. ^

1 Compare On the Loss of an Only Son Robert Marquis of Normanhy, by John Sheffield Duke of Buckinghamshire.

Several of Robert Herrick's lyrics combine with the exquisite form of Jonson's poems a sympathetic insight not to be found in verse at the close of the century. The form and diction of his Epitaph Upon A Child and Upon A Child that Dyed recall his master Jonson. A Grace for A Child is characterized by spontaneous simplicity/ Herrick's To His Saviour, A Child; A Present, By A Child, without losing sight of the human child, adds something of the mystic fervor and spiritual suggestion common in the most inspired passages on childhood in the seventeenth century. This element had already appeared in the well known Burning Babe of Southwell. The most exalted expression of the mystic longing for childhood days and moods is found in Henry Vaughan's The Retreate.

Happy those early days when I

Shined in my angel-infancy.

Before I understood this place

Appointed for my second race,

Or taught my soul to fancy aught

But a white, celestial thought;

When yet I had not walked above

A mile or two from my first love.

And looking back — at that short space —

Could see a glimpse of His bright face. . . .

With these immortal lines should be associated the paragraph penned by Bishop Earle in his Microcosmographie : "A child is a man in a small letter. His soul is yet a white paper unscribbled with observations of the world. . . .

1 Here a little child I stand, Heaving up my either hand; Cold as paddocks though they be, Here I lift them up to thee, For a benizon to fall On our meat, and on us all. Amen.

INTRODUCTION V

He is purely happy, because he knows no evil. . . . Hee kisses and loves all. And, when the smart of the rod is past, smiles on his bearer. The elder hee grows hee is a staire lower from God. 'Hee is the Christian's example, and the old man's relapse. The one imitates his pureness, the other his simplicity. Could hee put off his body with his little coat, hee had got eternitie without a burthen, and exchanged but one Heaven for another."

On the one hand lyrics of the Elizabethan age give frankly human and vigorous expression to themes from childhood, while on the other the deep insight of Vaughan and Herrick clothes in tender lines their sense of ''something more" than physical reality. Childhood in the sense of the Elizabethan singers and their followers, who in Vaughan carried interpretation to its highest spiritual possibilities, disappears from English poetry until in the eighteenth century those sentimental poets who prepared the way for Wordsworth take up the theme again haltingly.

In Crashaw's Holy Nativity of Our Lord, the shepherds are named Tityrus and Thyrsis. Milton's On the Morning of Christ's Nativity contains allusions to Cynthia, Apollo, and Delphos, and On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough to Jove, Elysian fields, and Olympus. In these poems the tendency away from direct observation of children and toward classical embellishment is as clear as in Herrick's The Wounded Cupid. This poem reveals those delightful toyings with the pagan Cupid which were to dominate classicist complimentary verse ostensibly written on the theme of childhood.

The education of the age was thoroughly classical. The poets most studied, quoted, and imitated were those of Greece and Rome. While exalting the classical standard, men of letters restricted themselves largely to the methods employed by Horace and Virgil. In imitating these poets, they aimed to use subject-matter susceptible of treatment in the manner which they considered classical.^

Poets of this school seldom show a vital conception of childhood. Waller felt it necessary to justify his use of English in the epitaph on the only son of Lord Andover; and in a poem On English Verse he writes that poets who seek a lasting reputation must carve in Latin or Greek. It is hardly to be expected that poetry conceived in such a mood will reveal a lively appreciation of children. Waller's approach was artificial when he wrote that in the starry night fond children cry for *'the rich spangles that adorn the sky." His favorite choice of theme and development is typically illustrated in St. James Park. Children do not appear in the one hundred and fifty lines of the poem; but a thousand cupids ride the billows. The poem represents a conception in which human childhood can have no part. The subject is embroidered with classicalities because the gallant poet is interested in fine compliments. Only cupids, the spies of Thetis, are of use to him.

Abraham Cowley, who helped prepare the way for Dryden, and enjoyed a reading public deep into the eighteenth century, also reveals tendencies that carried poets away from the Elizabethan tradition. As his classical attainments are closely bound up with his school life, he has enshrined the memory of his teacher, Mr. Jordan, second master at Westminster. The master's virtues, his great store of learning, and his simple character are discerned with difficul-

1 In The Complete English Gentleman Defoe satirizes classicalities: "Not an author writes a pamphlet, not a poet a copy of verses, no, not to his mistress, tho she knows nothing of the matter, but he draws a bill upon Horace or Virgil or some of the old chiming train, and talks as familiarly of them as if they had been brought up together."

ty among generalizations and elaborations. The unwillingness of the classicists to treat childhood in terms of common observation, and their imitation of the style and diction of Latin literature, are clearly indicated in the artificial Happy Birth of the Duke, in which the child is the occasion rather than the subject of the poem. There is a clumsy echo like this:

Time, which devours Its own sons, will be glad and proud of yours.

Stilted phrases mar the effusion, which might have been phrased as a poem of simple, unaflFected childhood, for Cowley, as private secretary to Queen Henrietta Maria during her exile, was intimately acquainted with those to whom the poem is addressed.

Dryden's most appealing lines on childhood recall at times the happy phrasing of Jonson, as in the Pastoral Elegy on the Death of Amyntas and Death of a Very Young Gentleman. His beautiful lines in the latter poem reveal the growing tendency to treat the child in terms of manhood. The custom of magnifying the helpless infant into the stature of a man, in part explained by the particular subject, is manifest in certain lines of Britannia Rediviva.

"Poetic diction" is in itself, as an ideal of elegance, unfavorable to the portrayal of childhood. Addison's Princess of Wales indicates how childhood serves merely as a point of departure for strained compliments. The general reliance on conventional imagery is obvious in a poem addressed to the House of Nassau by John Hughes, who echoes the same classical parallel Dry den had employed in his lines to the Stuarts. 'Addison's Campaign is a typical illustration of the way childhood was noticed to heighten eflfect in panegyrical verse. John Philipps's Blenheim reads like an unconscious satire of the type. In the passage in which Philipps depicts infant suffering to heighten the destructiveness of war, the situation is generaHzed and the lines are crowded with pretentious phrases.

where cities stood, Well-fenced and numerous, desolation reigns And emptiness : dismayed, unfed, unhoused, The widow and the orphan stroll around The desert wide; with oft retorted eye They view the gaping walls and poor remains Of mansions once their own, (now loathsome haunts Of birds obscene), bewailing loud the loss Of spouse, or sire, or son, ere manly prime, Slain in sad conflict, and complain of Fate As partial and too rigorous, nor find Where to retire themselves, or whence appease The afflictive keen desire for food, exposed To winds and storms and jaws of savage beasts.

In the mood of the classicists, childhood was a period to be rapidly passed over. Like Dryden, Pope also employs the rapid generalized summary of infancy and childhood.^ Until he reaches the state of manhood in his summary, Pope is not interested in details. The first two lines rapidly carry the reader over the period of infancy, and the couplet on childhood is noncommittal as to details.

Pope's Messiah was written in imitation of Virgil's Pollio. References to infancy are uninspired. In Pope's lines the child becomes an ^'auspicious babe" and ''smiling infant" who will play with the "crested basilisk and speckled snake." It will look with pleasure upon the "green lustre" of the scales, and will innocently play with the "forky tongue." Such elaborated accessories are out of harmony

1 The classicists were undoubtedly indebted to a passage in Horace's Ars Poetica for this. See Roscommon's translation. But note also the speech of Jaques in As You Like It. — Essay on Man.

with childhood.^ In fact, Pope was temperamentally noft fitted for the task of phrasing such a situation with Old Testament simplicity. Homely surroundings were not congenial to his powers. "He had been at his best in the speeches of the Iliad, and groaned heavily over the homely scenes in Ithaca." Wordsworth cited Pope's Messiah as an illustration of reprehensible diction.

Certain passages in John Gay's Trivia (1716) reveal a close approach to realistic observation of childhood. Yet even here Gay finds it necessary to use the machinery of classical mythology. He traces the parentage and "secret rise" of the "sable race" known as London bootblacks. While writing of the "tide whose sable streams beneath the city glide" he elaborates the legend of the goddess Cloacina. She fell in love with a London streetsweeper and gave birth to a child who "through various risks, in years improved." Then follows a brief account of the first years in the life of a London waif, with minute details of Holborn life, which as far as they go rival in vividness the circumstantial account in Defoe's Colonel Jacques. The little waif's mother finally persuades the gods to take the foundling's part and to teach him a useful trade. Diana furnishes a brush made of the "strong bristles of the mighty boar." The god of day provides a tripod "amid the crowded way to raise the dirty foot." Neptune contributes "fetid oil pressed from the enormous whale," and Vulcan "aids with soot the new japanning art." As Cloacina descends at sunrise, she finds the "sturdy lad" musing over Holborn's "black canal of mud," and bemoaning his lack of father and mother. The goddess mother soothes him and directs him in the employment of the gifts of the gods.

^ Compare William Thompson's The Nativity (1736) and The Magi: A Sacred Eclogue for similar treatment.

The fine attitude of Elizabethan singers, and the gentle mysticism of poets like Vaughan, are not to be found in those poets who adhered to the school of Dryden and Pope. During the first half of the eighteenth century, poetry was largely didactic, satiric, and rational, so that little place was found for children and the parental emotions for them. Parents have always loved and observed their children, and this affectionate regard has been expressed in poetry from the time of Homer's Astyanax. Very rarely, however, before the close of the eighteenth century have children seized upon the poetic imagination. The great movements in thought and emotion which stirred the century tended more and more to direct attention to the child. This attention was both reflected and stimulated by the poets whose verse is the subject of this study.

Chapter I

In tracing the changes which took place in the poets' attitude toward infants and very young children, it is not essential to take into account a very large number of lines imbedded in poems on subjects not connected with childhood. Such incidental references do not as a rule indicate that the poet is writing of childhood in a sympathetic mood or with his eye on the individual child. Sometimes there is a charming glimpse which the lover of children is not willing to forget, as in John Philipps's Cyder, where children are momentarily noticed while they are gathering cowslips. Occasionally, as in the satirical lines of Prior and Lloyd, side glances to childhood are lively and enjoyable.^ Most often, however, they are mechanical and serve merely as more or less colorless examples to illustrate patly a point which the poet wishes to emphasize. ^ For a right un-

1 Compare Cowper's charming lines On Obsewing some Names of little Note recorded in the Biographia Britannica:

So when a child, as playful children use, Has burnt to tinder a stale last year's news, The flame extinct, he views the roving fire — There goes my lady, and there goes the squire; There goes the parson, oh ! illustrious spark, And there, scarce less illustrious, goes the clerk.

2 Langhorne has been discussing innate ideas, and makes his point ("No innate knowledge on the soul impressed") in the lines:

See the pleased infant court the flaming brand, Eager to grasp the glory in its hand.

(Enlargement of the Mind) Samuel Boyse's Hope's Farewell is colorless :

The joys you gave my youth to taste Were but like children's toys at best.

derstanding of the fundamental chang-e which took place during the eighteenth century in the poets' treatment of very young children, it will be necessary to observe poems in which the child is specifically the subject.

The detached poem was suggested usually by the child's birth, birthday, or death; but some of the most successful poems are not associated with special occasions. Before the middle of the century, poets as a rule addressed themselves to children of quality, and were interested in childhood rather than in the individual. During and after the sixties, the democratization of poetry is reflected in the increasing number of poems on children not connected with the nobility or the royal household. It will be noted that during the closing decades of the century the poet is occupied not merely with childhood, but also with the child. Although it is inevitable that in all these poems the child should be closely associated with his father and mother, special attention will be given to the poet's willingness and ability to observe the child as an individual being.

Among the writers of occasional verse in the early eighteenth century. Prior alone is regularly remembered by compilers of anthologies of children's verse. His charming poems reveal a delightful urbanity and lightness of touch that make him a master of vers de societe. He shows perfect command of the adroitly turned compliment. If the study of childhood in poetry were extended to include the poetic use of Cupid, it would be rewarding to consider Prior's sensuous realization of this pagan god, who frequently is a lively actor in the poems addressed to Chloe. The poet's conception of the young god is so vivid that he portrays him as sobbing before his mother Venus in childish accents. To My Lord Biickhurst (very ^yoiing, playing ivith a cat) shows Prior's charming treatment of the god of love^ and is as dainty in conception and phrasing as his effusions to Chloe.

The posthumously pubHshed To A Child of Quality (five years old, 1704, the author then forty) is too well known to need comment. Study of the poem reveals that only three stanzas are addressed to the child as a child. In the four closing stanzas she is treated as a girl and young woman. Prior in his most sprightly manner contrasts his age with her youth. He may write only until she can spell ; and he gives point to his feigned regret by observing that their different ages are ordained to move so that he will be ''past making love"

When she begins to comprehend it.

It is a frankly artful effusion. The child of quality is not so much the subject as the occasion of the poem. Prior expresses his middle-age interest in the child of quality, not by portraying an individual child but by assuming an air of playful gallantry.^

Although more didactic, A Letter (to the Honourable Lady Margaret Cavendish Harley, zvhen a child) is written with a closer approach to the child spirit. The poem lacks the delicate weaving of his other pieces, but in its headlong tumble of rhythm reflects the merry Prior who, we are told, delighted to be the carefree companion of children. And no doubt he succeeded in convincing children of his genuineness, as Peggy's later tribute, after she had become Duchess of Portland, indicates: "he made himself