On the Romantic Conception of Childhood

Suffer little children and forbid them not - 

for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven

I.

If there's one child in modern philosophy and literature who should have been aborted, it's Jean-Jacques Rousseau's fictional offspring Émile (1762). For this immaculate conception fatally shapes the ideal of childhood not just in the Romantic and Victorian period, but well into the twentieth century.

Indeed, in some quarters, there is still an ideal insistence on the essential moral superiority of an individual child over the collective corruption of adulthood. To grow up - I was recently informed - is to fall into complacent mediocrity, accepting of your own limitations and all the evils of the world (i.e. to grow up, is to give up).

Those who believe this - whether they know it or not - are giving credence to the opening li(n)e of Rousseau's book which asserts that each and every child is perfect at the point of their divine creation - Rousseau rejects the notion of Original Sin - but quickly degenerates within a social system designed to erode their natural goodness.   

According to Voltaire, when not fantasising about the noble savage, Rousseau likes to imagine himself as part-educator, part wet nurse to an infantalised humanity. 


II.

Thanks, then, to Rousseau and his novelistic treatise Émile, from around the middle of the 18th century many cultivated and otherwise perfectly intelligent people began to view childhood in a more sentimental light; i.e., as an authentic state of innocence and freedom.

The traditional idea - that children were born sinful and therefore required moral instruction and setting on the path to righteousness with discipline and punishment - was thrown out with the bath water. Perhaps, it was argued, what children really needed was love and affection. And perhaps they should be encouraged to express themselves and develop their healthy instincts and natural creativity.

If Rousseau was right, then, it was hoped, his method of education would preserve the special attributes of childhood and this would result in well-adjusted adults and model citizens.     


III.

Rousseau's ideas rapidly crossed the Channel - Émile was first published in English in 1763 - and disseminated by Romantic poets, including Blake and Wordsworth, who fully bought into the idea of childhood as something blessed. After all, hadn't Jesus told his disciples that in order to enter God's Kingdom they too had to become as children [Matthew 18: 1-5].

This new idealised version of childhood became (and remained) an immensely powerful myth; in all kinds of literature and art, the innocence and purity - and, yes, even the supposed wisdom - of the pre-pubescent was promoted as something that adults should cherish and learn from. Children, it was now thought, were not only our future, they were our salvation too - And a little child shall lead them!

But, of course, these weren't actual children - snot-nosed brats who like to pull the wings off flies - they were, rather, imaginative representations. Even artworks that appeared realistic were underpinned by cultural understandings of childhood and reflected the values and desires of the artist; usually male, usually upper-middle class, and with little knowledge of children living outside the nursery and no direct experience of what day-to-day childcare involved - Nanny takes care of all that.

IV.

By the mid-19th century, the so-called Cult of Childhood arguably reached its nauseating and slightly pervy peak. Lewis Carroll, for example, wasn't simply content to celebrate the childhood of Alice Liddell and her sisters in his writing (and nude photography), but liked to confess his longing to return to a state of infancy himself. A poem entitled 'Solitude' closes with the following lines:

I’d give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life’s decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer-day.

Now, it's one thing to gaze upon the world with childlike wonder - and perhaps the struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play. But it's another thing for a man to actually want to be a child and give an obscene literal rendering to Christ's words. This, says Lawrence, is an extreme form of decadence; a sheer relaxation and letting go of all adult pride and responsibility. 


V.

When not dreaming of regression like Lewis Carroll, there were other men, with darker fantasies, conceiving of ways in which adolescence could be deferred and children kept in a state of eternal childhood. Thus it is that in some of the best-read and most-loved Victorian fantasies we discover a sinister tendency for child characters to die and thus, in this way, remain forever young.

So it is we arrive at a fatal conclusion: idealism ends in murder - for each man kills the thing he loves most. This is why child worship is a form of cruelty and abuse. Place a child on a pedestal, fetishise their virgin purity, and you'll soon find you've built a sacrificial altar ...

See: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom, (Basic Books, 1979).

On Lewis Carroll and His Love for Alice Liddell and Other Little Girls

Six-year old Alice Liddell dressed as a beggar-child 

in a photograph by Lewis Carroll (1858)

As everyone knows, Lewis Carroll was extremely fond of children (except boys) and very much liked to keep their company. And to photograph them. He seems to have found their beauty unearthly, though not inhuman in the manner of the nymphet as described by Nabokov.

Adopting the Roman symbol of good fortune, Carroll would call a white stone day one on which he met by chance a memorable girl-child; on a train journey, for example, or at an exhibition, or perhaps at the seaside. He always carried with him a little bag full of puzzles, tricks and small gifts with which to entertain any little girls he might encounter on such a day. And he carried too a supply of safety pins for pinning up their skirts, should they wish to paddle in the surf.

Many lovely little creatures skipped and danced their way into Carroll's life and his affections. But none quite left their mark on him as did Alice Liddell, who, again as everyone knows, provided the inspiration (or at the very least the name) for Carroll's most famous literary creation.

There has been much speculation - not all of it pleasant or supported with evidence - about the precise nature of Carroll's relationship with Alice (as, indeed, with her older sister, Lorina). I doubt very much, however, that he wanted to sexually abuse her and would refrain from (retrospectively) describing him as a predatory paedophile; it's important to remember that Carroll lived in a time very different from our own.   

Having said that, he was clearly infatuated with the girl, whom he adored in that peculiar Victorian manner - sublimating illicit desire into ideal moral sentiment - and although there's no record of actual impropriety, there were enough elements of perviness to concern her mother who, eventually, took steps to discourage Carroll's relationship with her daughters and burned all of his early letters to Alice (letters that often closed with 10,000,000 kisses).

Ultimately, if obliged to take a position on this affair, I tend to agree with the American writer and critic, Katie Roiphe, whose 2001 work, Still She Haunts Me, is a fictional reimagining of the relationship between Carroll and Alice which suggests they were essentially friends with benefits - but not the kind of benefits that we've come to expect.

I agree also with Roiphe, writing in an essay, that, whilst Carroll was no drooling child molester, neither was he the shy, stuttering, essentially sexless bachelor that some of his defenders would have us believe. It is, she writes, simply absurd to claim that Carroll was drawn to little girls on a purely spiritual plane; his erotico-aesthetic appreciation of their physical charms was too conspicuous.

To his credit, however, he exercised great discipline and, rather than indulge his carnal urges, produced amazing works of imaginative nonsense instead. There is, says Roiphe, something noble in a practice of self-restraint "so forceful that it spews out stuttering tortoises and talking chess pieces ..."

She concludes:

"There is something touching about a man who fights the hardest fight in the world: his own desire. You can feel the loneliness on the page. You can the feel the longing in the photographs. You can witness the self-contempt in his diaries. ... He had impure thoughts, yes. But what matters, in the end, is what he did with them."

See: Katie Roiphe, 'Just Good Friends', article in The Guardian (29 Oct 2001): click here to read.