By the time she was twenty-five, two of her children had died and a third had been still-born a fourth pregnancy had culminated in miscarriage. On average, one in four children died within a decade of birth, less than in previous generations but a stark reality nonetheless rare was the family that hadn’t lost a child.Īgainst the Wordsworthian ideal, then, we might set the example of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Survival meant the possibility of mourning an older, deceased child (as Wordsworth knew from experience). Forty years later, despite (or, perhaps in part, because of) the obstetric studies of men such as William Hunter and William Smellie, childbirth remained a terrifying and painful experience that often culminated in death for the mother. Shandy turns “as pale as ashes at the very mention of it,” and the subject quickly drops. When, in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760), the philosophizing Walter Shandy suggests to his wife the potential benefits of a Caesarean birth, he neglects to mention the fact that this almost certainly meant death to the mother Mrs. The disparity between the mythology of the Romantic child (often a masculine construction) and its reality is apparent in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), where a misbehaved toddler nearly strangles the heroine, Anne Elliot. His chimney sweepers, heads shaved, maintain innocence as a sustaining fantasy: “Hush Tom never mind it, for when your head’s bare / You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair” (“The Chimney Sweeper,” ll.
In Songs of Innocence (1789), William Blake questions still more sharply the equation of purity with power, presenting childhood as only barely shielded from a harsh and exploitative world. Yet there is a tension in the poem between this fantasy of mobility and mastery and the reality of the sleeping, silent baby. He thus imagines little Hartley wandering “like a breeze / By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags / Of ancient mountain,” fully able to “see and hear/ The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible” of God’s “eternal language” (lines 54-60). Similarly, in “Frost at Midnight” (1797), Samuel Taylor Coleridge portrays his infant son Hartley as a blest being whose closeness to nature endows him with heightened perceptive power. Thus, despite being imprisoned by a tyrannical father all through adolescence, Elizabeth Inchbald’s angelic heroine Matilda, in A Simple Story (1791), somehow sustains a spotlessness of demeanor and generosity of soul. “Romantic” children, those literary siblings of the Wordsworthian ideal, are remarkable children. The figure of the child-a staple of Romanticism-represented qualities under threat in an increasingly commercial and urban society, such as autonomy, intimacy with nature, and an unmitigated capacity for wonder and joy. But newborn babies trail many things besides clouds of glory, and the compulsion to imagine childhood as a state of paradise might be understood as a reaction against the pressure of a harsh world of experience.
64–76)Įmbodying innocence, immediacy, and uncultivated vision, the Wordsworthian child is an idealized construction offering a model for the male poet seeking to redeem the dying-away of light and joy.
The Youth, who daily farther from the east Shades of the prison-house begin to closeīut He beholds the light, and whence it flows, An understanding of the prevailing attitude toward children in the Romantic period begins with William Wordsworth’s mythology of the infant as a “Seer blest”:
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