Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I The Ends of Enlightenment
- Part II Geographies: The Scenes of Literary Life
- Part III Histories: Writing in the New Movements
- 15 Rebellion, revolution, reform: the transit of the intellectuals
- 16 Changes in the world of publishing
- 17 The new poetries
- 18 Romanticism and poetic autonomy
- 19 Transformations of the novel – I
- 20 Transformations of the novel – II
- 21 Theatre, performance and urban spectacle
- 22 The epigenesis of genre: new forms from old
- 23 The literature of the new sciences
- 24 The making of child readers
- Part IV The Ends of Romanticism
- Chronology
- Bibliographies
- Index
- 1 A New Pocket Map of the Cities of London and Westminster; with the Borough of Southwark, Comprehending the new Buildings and other Alterations, 3rd edn (London: William Faden, 1790).">
- References
24 - The making of child readers
from Part III - Histories: Writing in the New Movements
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2009
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I The Ends of Enlightenment
- Part II Geographies: The Scenes of Literary Life
- Part III Histories: Writing in the New Movements
- 15 Rebellion, revolution, reform: the transit of the intellectuals
- 16 Changes in the world of publishing
- 17 The new poetries
- 18 Romanticism and poetic autonomy
- 19 Transformations of the novel – I
- 20 Transformations of the novel – II
- 21 Theatre, performance and urban spectacle
- 22 The epigenesis of genre: new forms from old
- 23 The literature of the new sciences
- 24 The making of child readers
- Part IV The Ends of Romanticism
- Chronology
- Bibliographies
- Index
- 1 A New Pocket Map of the Cities of London and Westminster; with the Borough of Southwark, Comprehending the new Buildings and other Alterations, 3rd edn (London: William Faden, 1790).">
- References
Summary
Around 1800, William Pitt Scargill recalls in Recollections of a Blue-Coat Schoolboy (Harvey and Darton, 1829), ‘very little attention was paid to the reading of boys’. In the absence of ‘rational books’ (p. 74) designed for children, pupils at Christ’s Hospital read chapbooks during recreation hours. Even in school, ‘while we appeared to be learning our lessons, we were amusing ourselves with Robinson Crusoe or Jack the Giant Killer’ (p. 92), concealed amid grammars and dictionaries. When a pupil was sent to change the dormitory nurse’s novel at a nearby circulating library, he skimmed it on the way home, and might be allowed to take it into dinner. ‘Sometimes three or four of us would sit together on the steps of the grammar-school, poring over the same book, and reading with most astonishing rapidity page after page’. Together, the boys ‘contrived to obtain possession of the whole story’; ‘however imperfectly picked up’ (p. 76), it was retold whenever ‘four or five’ met in one bed for hours of ‘irregularities’ (p. 74): clandestine, nocturnal story-telling sessions.
As a child, Samuel Taylor Coleridge escaped school-fellows’ taunting by chapbook reading, yet the stories so haunted him that his father burnt them. For Scargill’s schoolboys, chapbooks function rather as social glue, counterbalancing a curriculum of rote memorization and Latin recitation. These boys immerse themselves indiscriminately in the popular narratives of the chapbook and lending-library novels, parts of a common literary repertoire; such narratives generate both book-reading and oral experiences for the same readers.
Keywords
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- The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature , pp. 553 - 578Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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