nf0056: hello er good afternoon i know most of you but for those of you i don't 
know i'm namex er and again some of you will know this some of you won't i 
don't necessarily know what we'll be doing today i don't lecture from a preset 
plan so it depends a little bit on you if you don't understand what i'm talking 
about you want me to repeat things or explain it please wave your hand don't 
worry if you think that nobody else may be sharing your concerns just go ahead 
er likewise if i'm going much too slowly and you think yeah yeah we know all of 
this just let me know again i'll stop once in a while and ask you there's no 
point my going on and on if you're all sitting there going either yes this is 
blindingly obvious or saying i haven't got a clue what she's talking about 
because this is for you i don't it's not for my personal gratification to come 
and talk here it's for something that you know you can use er i've given you 
quite a large handout it's just a couple of sections of 
text i won't be going through all of them obviously besides just not having the 
time it's also pretty useless i'm just going to use them to focus on some ideas 
and talk through some ideas er and if we don't get through all of them then 
hopefully i can just point you ahead at what might be interesting and relevant 
about them okay er the lecture is called Nineteenth Century Fiction and the 
Dream of Childhood now er some people might think oh you know it's a marginal 
lecture it's going to be on something quite unimportant it's going to be on 
something to do with children and it's not very important there are not a lot 
of children in texts in fact this lecture is going to be about all kinds of 
issues which are absolutely crucial for thinking about any form of fiction 
including nineteenth century fiction so the things i'm going to talk about here 
may look like they're focused around the issue of childhood but they have to do 
with almost every aspect of thinking critically 
about fictional texts so all those people who aren't here today because they 
thought this is not an important lecture are in very bad luck and you're in 
good luck [laugh] er it's an a common misunderstanding you'll also find this 
theme re-emerging er in your third year courses for instance with Wordsworth 
Dickens and so on and we'll pick up on this so something about childhood why is 
this relevant the first issue i'm going to talk about is the idea that 
childhood like every other identity is an idea it is not despite what most 
critics say and they say very strange things about childhood it is not a 
biological or somehow some kind of genetic truth neither is there a kind of 
psychological truth about it no matter what many critics assume and what they 
say er it's the same case for those of you who are going to do be doing women's 
writing or if you think about gender there is not a truth about women or about 
femininity these are cultural ideas er it's significant that we don't talk in 
the 
same way about masculinity as being a psychological or a biological or a 
genetic issue for instance er one famous geneticist that i know of who got very 
very irritated with the kind of simplistic assumptions some other people make 
about the role of science in determining identify once said well for instance 
we have one huge piece of information which is we know exactly er what has to 
do with the majority of people genetically becoming criminals and all the other 
geneticists he was talking about went [gasp] what big piece of news is this 
what huge thing has been discovered and in fact of course as you probably will 
already have guessed what he was talking about was the fact that most criminals 
are men and gender is genetically determined you either have an X and a Y 
chromosome or two Xs and that's what makes you a man or a woman biologically 
speaking er so in fact you know one could make that claim in fact of course 
it's something which is completely unprovable it has to do 
with the ideas of politics in society about gender what are appropriate roles 
appropriate behaviours er why they're seen as appropriate roles and behaviours 
and the same thing is true of childhood so the reason this subject is so 
important is because instead of talking about texts as being kind of 
observational er systems looking at what is a child like and then saying does 
this text get it right or does this text get it wrong which is what most 
critics do have a look around and test this out for yourself you may find you 
disagree with me but in my experience i can only offer you that as a devil's 
advocate go and have a look most critics will say yes it's exactly what 
children are like in this text the way the child is described spot on that's a 
real child what is this real child in and interestingly another critic will say 
no that's not what children are like at all why because there are different 
ideas about childhood but it's also the problematic assumption 
that fiction is about going around and saying that's a truth that's what truth 
is really like this novel is about what women are really like and all other 
novels have got it wrong or some other novels have got it wrong i mean it's 
like looking into this room and saying er that person over there is exactly 
what a woman is like and all you other women are just sort of you haven't got 
it quite right yet you know it's just that woman who is exactly what a woman is 
li-, i mean it would be an absolutely nonsensical claim particularly on top of 
that if they were talking about a piece of fiction which is made up anyway it's 
the same problem with looking at novels and saying that's what nineteenth 
century society was like no they're made up they don't have to be like 
nineteenth society at all in the first place and even if they are which 
nineteenth s-, century society are they like which aspect of the nineteenth 
century society lot of people for instance talk about 
things like the woman being the angel in the house well most women in the 
nineteenth century weren't being angels in houses at all they were working down 
coal mines or on fields so when i get a whole load of essays by people on their 
finals saying women in the nineteenth century were locked into their house and 
they were the angels in the house and that's because that's what nineteenth 
century society was like well no [laugh] it's not the case these are ideas 
ideologies about political and social assumptions wishes desires fantasies make-
believe about what identities are about and childhood is a particularly 
important one the way childhood is used the idea of childhood or ideas of 
childhood have to do with three issues which are crucial to fiction i'm going 
to come back to this again and again but they are memory which is crucial 
because every text is retrospective when you think about it they're all about 
things which have by definition happened in a past otherwise 
the text wouldn't be finished and in front of you wouldn't have a beginning a 
middle and an ending so childhood is about the idea of memory or ideas of 
memory course we don't know how memory works there are only different concepts 
of memory but the idea of memory they are about the idea of language that is 
childhood has to do with ideas of language the idea of what it means to be 
written or to write and it has to do with the idea of consciousness what kind 
of view or image or idea what way does someone look at the world i'll come back 
to this 'cause these are very broad categories memory language consciousness 
and i'll i'll show you those in the text hopefully what i mean exactly by this 
and some idea of how texts are narrated has to do with memory er idea of 
languages how do you represent an idea consciousness and language and memory in 
texts and the idea of the consciousness is what kind of vision or perspective 
does the text locate to certain identities i 
mean you might have come across an example of the latter for instance i don't 
know if you've ever seen or heard people talking about oh when children look at 
art they have this pure vision that's an idea for instance of vision and 
consciousness which is allocated at children not only do we have no evidence 
for this kind of idea whatsoever we've no evidence children go around going wow 
great painting you know really love that absolutely fresh vision we have no 
evidence for this whatsoever and even if it were the case is it case for all 
five year olds do all five year olds do this there are other cultures where 
ideas about childhood are entirely different they don't go around thinking that 
children have some sort of pure vision or innocence about them now you've got 
consciousness there and how you're going to define consciousness okay how am i 
doing so far am i going too fast or too slow do you see where i'm going shall i 
keep going or stop yes keep going you 
okay yeah okay er i'll pick up the first page on your handout what i want to do 
with this and the next extract the first one is from Mrs Sherwood's book The 
Fairchild Family which was published in a whole range of volumes from eighteen-
eighteen to eighteen-forty-seven and please please forget the titles and the 
dates 'cause they're absolutely no use to you whatsoever [laugh] i've just put 
them on so if you want to go and look up the text you know where you might find 
them but you don't need to repeat dates and names they have no meaning at all 
er and i'm going to use the next extract to compare to that which is Catherine 
Sinclair's Holiday House from eighteen-thirty-nine as it says on the handout 
the reason i want to use these two texts is first of all to illustrate to you 
again how there are widely differing ideas of childhood for instance you may 
have heard politicians talk about the ideas of Victorian childhood and what it 
was like to be a child in the Victorian days a 
lot of politicians nowadays seem to think that was a rather nice thing it's a 
good thing to be Victorian you know some good stiff beating and some strict 
schooling and some good discipline this is you know a lot of politicians are 
very happy with this idea nowadays but i want to actually illustrate here that 
in two texts which are more or less con-, contemporary more or less there are 
two radically different ideas about what childhood is about what it has to do 
with so we'll start with The Fairchild Family Fairchild Family shows up in 
comparison to the other handout i'll be looking at or the other section of the 
handout i'll be looking at in a moment two ideas of childhood here the one 
we're looking at is evangelical it has to do with a particular idea about 
religion and spiritual status where the child is posited as not innocent as 
fallen already so the child has to aspire to spiritual redemption it has to be 
saved okay so this is not a vision of a 
child who is innocent this is an idea of childhood that it is fallen it is in 
the fallen state of man and it has to be redeemed so that's the first thing to 
look at the second issue it has to do with is class ideas of childhood but also 
gender for instance are mediated by ideas of class i mentioned before the 
example of saying in Victorian fiction women are angels in the house and then 
saying well no it depends entirely if you are thinking about any connection 
with the society depends on an ideal of a middle class woman or an upper middle 
class woman er who is in the text represented as an idea of purity and an idea 
of non-contamination with the world she has lily-white hands 'cause she doesn't 
work 
she is pure because she is not contaminated by society that's why she is in a 
house that's where the term angel in the house comes from so again ideas in the 
text er which are not at all about some simple view of representing history or 
history's views or society's views well in this text The Fairchild Family and 
look at the that name fair child beautiful child er there's a family father and 
mother and the children have been arguing together if you look at the top of 
page fifty-six and here's fifty-six fifty-seven on the er photocopy there er 
the father says to his children have you not read how wicked Cain in his anger 
killed his brother Abel and do you not remember the verse in one John two-
fifteen whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer and ye know that no murderer 
hath eternal life abiding in him his daughter Emily not surprisingly here says 
oh papa papa we will never be angry again and what does Mr Fairchild say my 
dear Emily you must not 
say that you will never be angry again but that you will pray to God in the 
name of the Lord Jesus Christ your great redeemer to send his Holy Spirit into 
your heart and to take away these wicked passions so you see here the idea of 
the child as uncontrolled wickedness already present in its heart which it must 
banish out through looking to the redeemer the one who redeems Jesus who 
sacrificed his life in Christian doctrine to absolve the sin of people so this 
idea that the child is actually in a position of aspiring to banishing out 
wickedness which is already there so here my dear child Lucy then says the 
other daughter when the Spirit of God is in me shall i never hate any more or 
be in wicked passions any more if the Spirit of God isn't there it has to be 
obtained it has to be found my dear child answered Mr Fairchild the Lord Jesus 
Christ says by this shall all men know that ye are my disciples if you have 
love one towards another therefore if you 
are followers of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of God is in you you will 
love everybody even those who hate you and use you ill then Mr Fairchild kissed 
his children and forgave them and they kissed each other and Mr Fairchild gave 
them leave to dine with him as usual and after dinner he says to his wife i 
will take the children this evening to Blackwood and show them something there 
which i hope they will remember as long as they live and i hope they will take 
warning from it and pray more earnestly for new hearts have to get new hearts 
that they may love each other with perfect and heavenly love so not again the 
idea of a childhood innocence that we find in other texts where the child is an 
innocent on earth but on the contrary an idea of a child who must aspire to 
heavenly love to the idea of a perfection which it does not yet have access to 
Blackwood well what is at Blackwood what are they going to do there right i 
will jump now to the bottom of 
the next page fifty-seven 'cause off they go to Blackwood with the father the 
mother stays home and what do they see what are they going to do there at 
Blackwood well at the bottom page fifty-seven it says the garden was overgrown 
with grass and weeds the fruit trees wanted pruning and it could now hardly be 
seen where the walks had been look at that idea of the natural world completely 
overrun the natural world here is not something which is good as a wilderness 
it means it represents the idea of an uncontrolled child a naturalness which is 
rampant which has obscured order and civilization which is not pruned back 
again just to notice that the text does not accord for instance with some 
modern ecological notions that nature is great when it's wild quite a different 
kind of ideology attached to this here nature has broken down a large brick 
house which has fallen to ruin the garden the area of cultivation is overgrown 
with grass and weeds if you 
don't cultivate things if you don't look for this new heart you're going to be 
overgrown by grass and weeds the fruit trees wanted pruning they lacked pruning 
wanted needed pruning and it could hardly be seen where the walks had been look 
what happens next and you'll see the connections made here this is why 
description of course is always crucially important to novels description is 
never just about description i don't know if you're some of the people or some 
of you or if some of the people who think oh i'll skip that bit i'll just go on 
to what happens next [laugh] but in fact the description is crucial it's never 
just a pretty picture it's always part of how the novel is constructing er its 
own ideology and its own ideas about all kinds of things which are going on so 
here as well one of the old chimneys had fallen down breaking through the roof 
of the house in one or two places in other words the roof the protection of the 
house has been breached because of the falling of the 
chimneys the place is in such disrepair and the glass windows were broken near 
the place where the garden wall had fallen next page glass barriers walls have 
all been broken through breached just between that and the wood stood a gibbet 
on which the body of a man hung in chains it had not yet fallen to pieces 
though it had hung there for some years the body had on a blue coat a silk 
handkerchief round the neck with shoes and stockings and every other part of 
the dress still entire but the face of the corpse was so shocking that the 
children could not look upon it oh papa papa what is that cried the children 
that is a gibbet said Mr Fairchild and the man who hangs upon it is a murderer 
one who first hated and afterwards killed his brother when people are found 
guilty of stealing they are hanged upon a gallows and taken down as soon as 
they are dead but when a man has committed a murder he is hanged in iron chains 
upon a gibbet till his body falls to pieces that all 
who pass by may take warning by the example so the people who pass by according 
to Mr Fairchild take warning from this example and he is bringing his children 
there to take warning from this example very different kind of reading of 
Christianity for instance than that which talks about the forgiveness and 
compassion of Jesus this is a reading which is pretty much on the side of 
scaring the daylights out of everyone who was thinking anything bad so here 
we're talking about that kind of image of childhood in such a pronounced way 
they have to get this very extreme example of this body hanging there in the 
wind and in fact if you look at page fifty-nine they're talking about the 
mother of the man who is hanging there and Mr Fairchild says er your mama and i 
this is er pop top page fifty-nine used often to go and that is to visit this 
lady and should have gone oftener only we could not bear to see the manner in 
which she brought up her sons she never sent them to school 
lest the master should correct them but hired a person to teach them reading 
and writing at home but this man was forbidden to punish them they were allowed 
to be with the servants in the stable and kitchen but the servants were ordered 
not to deny them anything so they used to call them names swear at them and 
even strike them in other words it's a lack of discipline a lack of pruning a 
lack of order a lack of constraint which allows these children to like the 
garden and the house be completely overrun and fall into disrepair this is 
childhood potentially as dangerous anarchy as the fallen state of mankind now 
look at the text in the next page Catherine Sinclair's Holiday House which does 
something i'm suggesting quite different and does so in two ways the chapter's 
called The Terrible Fire and here there is a notion of childhood which is a 
notion that children cannot be possessed of wicked intent they are innocent 
almost no matter what they do the notion 
here of innocence is one of no evil intent whereas in as we just saw in The 
Fairchild Family there is a notion of a wicked intent which must be rigorously 
banished out here the situation is there's Lady Harriet and Uncle David who are 
raising the children who are orphans they are aristocrats they are not as in 
the other text a middle class or upper middle class family but here this is an 
aristocratic family Lady Harriet is their grandmother and the two children are 
Harry and Laura now i'm i'm also going to look at an extract with you later 
which i want you to notice this text for as well so keep in mind that it's 
going to have something to do with another text later on as well er Betty the 
servant runs breathlessly into the room this is the first section first page 
saying that Mrs Crabtree who's the nurse look again at the name crab tree 
crabby something fruitful natural also ought to come downstairs immediately as 
Lady Harriet this is the children's grandmother had 
suddenly been taken very ill and till the doctor arrived nobody knew what to do 
so she must give her advice and assistance Harry and Laura felt excessively 
shocked to hear this alarming news and listened with grave attention while Mrs 
Crabtree told them how amazingly well they ought to behave in her absence when 
they were trusted alone in the nursery with no one to keep them in order or to 
see what they were doing especially now as their grandmama had been taken ill 
and would require to be kept quiet so on the one hand it looks like it's going 
to do something similar to The Fairchild Family so you know you've got to 
behave properly sit still in the nursery don't do anything naughty but what 
happens next Harry sat in his chair and might have been painted as the very 
picture of a good boy during nearly twenty minutes after Mrs Crabtree departed 
and Laura placed herself opposite to him trying to follow so excellent an 
example while they scarcely spoke above a whisper wondering 
what could be the matter with their grandmama and wishing for once to see Mrs 
Crabtree again that they might hear how she was anyone who had observed Harry 
and Laura at that time would have wondered to see such two quiet excellent 
respectable children and wished that all little boys and girls were made upon 
the same pattern but presently they began to think that probably Lady Harriet 
was not so very ill and no more bells had rung during several minutes and Harry 
ventured to look about for some better amusement than sitting still two things 
are happening here i'd suggest the first one is we get a shift of narratorial 
stance where in the Fairchild Family we have a third person omniscient narrator 
who talks about the family mother father and children from the outside 
describing them and allocating to them this position of in the children innate 
wickedness and in the parents redeemed achieved goodness in this text the 
narrator starts to what is called by many 
critics look through the eyes of the child what that means however is not that 
this narrator knows the truth about children which Mrs Sherwood the writer of 
The Fairchild Family didn't know it means that the text is starting to see a 
certain position of consciousness and innocence as valuable 
rather you know no one wants to look through the child eyes in The Fairchild 
Family because they'd become really wicked you know no one wants to look from 
that position of wickedness of unredeemedness but the idea of making the idea 
of childhood as an identity the repository for the desirable the pure the 
innocent the good means that the narrator who is an adult wants to be in the 
position of looking it also has to do with the idea of understanding children 
any of you come across this this idea that there's two different ways of 
dealing with for instance young criminals i'm sure you read about this in the 
newspaper on the one hand there's the idea that you know who are all these 
softies who 
are being so nice to them who are saying we need to understand them they had a 
hard youth they can't help it that they tear apart the housing estate and then 
there's the other people aren't there who go oh all these softies completely 
ridiculous you need to be strict with these kids there's no point in sitting 
down and giving them nice therapy and social workers you need to teach them 
what's good and bad what's right from wrong have you come across this seen this 
in the newspapers this debate whichever side you're on yourself personally and 
that's up to you what i hope you can see is there's no right or wrong about 
those two positions intrinsically neither of them er can prove that their 
approach is necessarily more effective or not if we knew which one worked then 
you know you'd be applying it all the time the problem is it's based on two 
different ideas about society's requirement about how to deal with people about 
how people respond it's different ideas about 
morality about ethics and these will always change they always change depending 
on what the society desires of its citizens there is no one position you can 
get to and of course it's also divided up because there are different views 
about men and women different views about people from different different 
ethnic backgrounds different views of people from different class backgrounds 
and so on and those categories and items shift as well so it's not something 
we'll end up you know in ten years we know all about it it will have changed 
again and that it will be different changes so the first one here is that the 
narrator starts to speak both in terms of explaining the children's motives not 
going on there they were just told if you kill your brother you're going to be 
killed too don't behave like that here presently they began to think their 
thoughts are being represented their consciousness is being inhabited that 
probably Lady Harriet was not so very ill and no more bells 
had rung during several minutes and Harry ventured to look about for some 
better amusement here the idea as well is the children are not being wicked 
they're looking for amusement they've simply they have no concentration span 
have you come across this as well another changing idea we find another 
ideology about childhood you may have come across the idea that with all this 
multimedia children have short attention spans that's very interesting you know 
they're not computer babies they're not born of computers but there's an idea 
that somehow the children become what the society associates with them the idea 
is that kids love video games they love Nintendo and if they love Nintendo 
video games they're fast so kids don't have any attention spans any more again 
we have no measurement of people's attention spans across the ages and anyway 
what would you be measuring they said this about television when television 
came they said this about radio when radio came and they'll say it 
again you know now about the internet they're saying it again and in a moment 
we'll have WAP phones in three years and then they'll start to say that none of 
us think about what we see any more 'cause we're only on our WAP phones so you 
know these are different ideas about what the society finds desirable what it 
demands again of its citizens so here the notion in this text is that children 
want amusement and that they have short attention spans it's a couple of 
minutes they don't hear a bell and already they've forgotten their grandmother 
who they're shown in the previous passage to love dearly and to be very shocked 
at the idea that she's ill they've already forgotten about it probably not that 
ill i can't you know can't hold it in my mind that long and in this passage 
which i'll point you towards in a moment as well at this moment Laura unluckily 
perceived on the table near where they sat a pair of Mrs Crabtree's best 
scissors which she had been positively 
forbid to touch the long troublesome ringlets were as usual hanging over her 
eyes in a most teasing manner look at how this is all represented from Laura's 
point of view Laura's a little girl the long troublesome ringlets troublesome 
to Laura this is her perspective of her long hair were as usual hanging over 
her eyes in a most teasing manner teasing to her the narrator is completely 
within Laura's perspective so she thought what a good opportunity this might be 
to shorten them a very little not above an inch or two and without considering 
a moment longer she slipped upon tiptoe with a frightened look round the table 
picked up the scissors in her hands then hastening towards a looking glass she 
began snipping off the ends of her hair Laura was much diverted diverted again 
the notion of amusement diversion the idea that children want to be distracted 
or amused all the time you can see this can't you i mean maybe some of you have 
done this yourself if 
you take a child or a baby on an outing it's considered desirable to bring 
along a whole load of games and toys in in case it starts making noise or 
getting bored now that whole idea's present in this text in a way it was not in 
The Fairchild Family you come along and see the man hanging on the gibbet 
'cause you know you need to know how you ought to behave so she cut and cut on 
while the curls fell thicker and faster till at last the whole floor was 
covered with them and scarcely a hair left upon her head also the idea here of 
a child not being able to mediate rationally she decides first she's going to 
cut off an inch or two but ends up chopping off all her hair Harry went into 
fits of laughing when he perceived what a ridiculous figure Laura had made of 
herself here we're back in the narrator ridiculous figure is Harry and the 
narrator as an adult now she looks ridiculous and he turned her round and round 
to see the havoc she had made saying you 
should give all this hair to Mr Mills the upholsterer to stuff grandmama's 
armchair with at any rate Laura if Mrs Crabtree is ever so angry she can hardly 
pull you by the hair of the head again what a sound sleep you will have tonight 
with no hard curl-papers to torment you it's also an idea here of the girl 
being liberated by her long troublesome hair having been removed from her by 
herself she has cut herself free from the teasing hair and the hard curl-papers 
and Harry sympathizes with her in this plight okay er move on to a next section 
but the point here is i hope that i've illustrated two texts which might be 
thought are both being Victorian texts giving two quite different ideas about 
childhood using two quite different narrational er techniques to think about 
the desirability or not of that idea of consciousness that is attributed under 
this label here in these texts er and therefore also an idea of for instance 
gender which becomes engaged into 
that notion of identity er and the idea of childhood as inherently sinful or 
inherently saved so two quite ideas which run on next to each other er 
throughout these texts the next one i want to actually look at with you 
incidentally it's called The Terrible Fire because Harry of course er almost 
burns the house down as Laura cuts all her hair off Harry goes away and starts 
playing with candles and nearly burns the house down and significantly they 
aren't punished for this because they confess honestly the only crime in this 
text for children is to lie and that's because innocence may not lie if 
innocence lies it's no longer innocence so they may not violate their own 
positions so er they're no-, not punished in the text because they tell the 
truth now again you might say oh well they're two children's literature texts 
they're very obscure no one ever looks at them and indeed they're not studied 
much not even by children's literature critics er but i want to 
illustrate for you again why thinking about this category's is so important the 
next extract is from George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss the first reason i 
want to pick this up with you is to show again how ideas of identity are not 
also about looking at the real world and saying this is what children are like 
i don't know if you've come across this if you've looked or if any of you are 
looking in seminars at a text er or at The Mill on the Floss but even if you're 
not what you'll find is that a lot of critics go away and say this was George 
Eliot talking about her childhood this is what she was like as a girl this is 
what she remembers it being like this is exactly what poor Mary Ann Lewes was 
like when she was a little girl well i'm going to read the passage with you on 
page fifty-eight or fifty-seven sorry first page of this extract and you think 
again about the piece about Laura chopping off her hair and see whether you 
don't find them eerily familiar when 
you read this Tom followed Maggie upstairs into her mother's room and saw her 
go at once to a drawer for those of you who don't know the novel Tom and Maggie 
brother and sister just like Harry and Laura and saw her go at once to a drawer 
from which she took out a large pair of scissors what are they for Maggie said 
Tom feeling his curiosity awakened look at another child who is curious amused 
diverted Maggie answered by seizing her front locks and cutting them straight 
across the middle of her forehead another little girl cutting off her hair with 
a big pair of scissors oh my buttons Maggie you'll catch it exclaimed Tom you'd 
better not cut any more off snip went the great scissors again while Tom was 
speaking and he couldn't help feeling it was rather good fun again this idea of 
fun amusement Maggie would look so queer do you remember in the passage i've 
just read the notion about ridiculous Laura looking ridiculous well here Maggie 
looks queer here Tom cut it 
behind for me said Maggie excited by her own daring and anxious to finish the 
deed Maggie even more than Laura is excited by the cutting of her hair and 
wants to cut it all off in fact needs help from Tom you'll catch it you know 
said Tom nodding his head in an ad-, admonitory manner and hesitating a little 
as he took the scissors never mind make haste said Maggie giving a little stamp 
with her foot her cheeks were quite flushed the notion of excitement of fun of 
being caught up in this liberatory move remove the big hair that the the girl 
has to cope with release yourself into a freedom from this the black locks were 
so thick nothing could be more tempting to a lad who had already tasted the 
forbidden pleasure of cutting a pony's mane forbidden pleasures the idea that 
the more you forbid something to a child the more attractive it becomes again 
not a psychological truth about childhood or adulthood necessarily although it 
may fit with some adults with some 
children but more and again it's a spiritual idea a moral idea that you have 
here i speak to those says the narrator who now starts an speaking from an i 
position i speak to those who know the satisfaction of making a pair of shears 
meet through a duly resisting mass of hair one delicious grinding snip and then 
another and another and the hinder locks fell heavily on the floor and Maggie 
stood cropped in a jagged uneven manner but with a sense of clearness and 
freedom here you're actually told it explicitly as if she had emerged from a 
wood into an open plain oh Maggie said Tom jumping around her and slapping his 
knees as he laughed oh my buttons what a queer thing you look look at yourself 
in the glass you look like the idiot we throw nutshells to at school now i 
don't know if you're as convinced as i am but i think this passage comes 
straight from Sinclair's passage on Laura the idea of the look at the next line 
Maggie felt an unexpected pang she had thought before hand chiefly of her own 
deliverance from her teasing hair and teasing remarks about it right 
so i think not only do we achieve nothing of an understanding of what the text 
is doing by claiming that this is somehow just George Eliot or er again as her 
real name was er Mary Ann Lewes er claiming that somehow er this is you know 
her childhood her memory and all that childhood in texts is about is just 
saying this is what it was really like i really remember it so i'm not just 
trying to say oh yes but actually it comes from another text but also saying 
that recognizing that it comes from another text tells us much more clearly 
that childhood is an idea an idea you can change you can invest with certain 
meanings moral ethical political ideological meanings not some sort of truth 
about life truth how all five year old girls with long hair feel and i think 
the fact that in fact i don't know of any critic who's picked up because m-, so 
few people have read the 
Sinclair which is not a text which is in er publication and it has not been for 
a very very long time it just happens to be my area of research children's 
literature and then when you run into that you see only these tons of critics 
who've written on Mill on the Floss going oh it's it's Maggie it's Maggie is 
Mary Ann and it's George Eliot in her childhood and who don't look at what the 
notion of gender in childhood is about here because they're so convinced that 
it's simply writing down your experience of life and therefore they don't look 
for the text which i think is very clearly er to my mind an antecedent for this 
the second page i've included for a different reason and this is the idea about 
the language and memory i was talking about and i'm going to look at another 
text in this light as well on page fifty-nine the narrator starts doing 
something different i've mentioned either a third person narrator like in The 
Fairchild Family just describing what's 
going on and judging it i've mentioned the looking through the eyes of a child 
that happens in the Sinclair text and some of that happens here as well but i 
want to show you something else that happens as childhood becomes even more 
valued in this text than in The Holiday House in the Sinclair text and show you 
what the narrator does with the theory of memory and that it's a very very 
strange thing we've seen on this page fifty-seven that the narrator says i 
speak to those and she says narrator here or he i don't know if it's a he or a 
she here but i think it's defined as a she earlier on in the text i don't know 
b-, and by the way you know the narrator is not George Eliot anyway this is the 
narrator and not the author there's always a narrator in a text never the 
author i speak to those who know the satisfaction of making a pair of shears 
meet through a duly resisting mass of hair so the narrator is saying i know 
about this experience i think this was why so many 
critics get confused and think it's just George Eliot talking about her own 
childhood 'cause they think that i is George Eliot and of course it's not er an 
author can make up any narrator they like there are plenty of male authors who 
invent female narrators there are female authors who use male narrators er 
there are people writing in twentieth century who make up historical novels 
about narrators living in the eighteenth century it's fiction it's all make-
believe you can do exactly as you like and you can use all kinds of tricks and 
ideas with this idea of the narrator you can make them take different positions 
you can make them contradict themselves you can make them hold a whole lot of 
different views so it's never the author otherwise though the author could have 
just written my memories of my childhood by George Eliot wouldn't have needed 
to write a novel called The Mill on the Floss so here on page fifty-nine and 
i'll try and show you what's happening here okay 
how are we how are we doing so far are you okay yeah are you confused by now or 
no you've some idea of why this is as any inkling of what this is relevant to 
overall thinking about fiction starting to get some idea yeah okay i'll go on 
stop me otherwise if it comes up again ah my child this is the second line here 
you will have real troubles to fret about by and by is the consolation we have 
almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood and have repeated to 
other children since we have been grown up but of course the narrator doesn't 
know this the narrator can't know if this is true for any reader who's reading 
the text it's a rhetorical device it's a rhetorical device to address the 
reader and the reader may have nothing to do with what this person says and it 
doesn't matter it's a rhetorical device er er this is very similar to a 
politician walking into a hall and saying i know what you think but i'm going 
to tell you something new now in fact the politician 
doesn't have a clue what those people think he or she is playing on the notion 
playing on the rhetorical idea you have an idea in mind and i'm going to change 
it now whether or not this is true for the individual listeners on the hall er 
in the hall is really irrelevant it's a practice of rhetoric to set up one 
premise and then to say i'm going to challenge it you move backwards and 
forwards between those movements and if the people in the hall don't agree 
they'll simply walk out or they'll not vote for the politician that's democracy 
for you here the rhetoric is doing the same thing it is proposing an idea again 
about childhood as a past stage of life that everyone knows about of course 
again may not be true for the readers but this is what the text wants to work 
with and that it has to do with an idea of being brushed off not taken 
seriously not seen as having serious emotions and why does the text want to do 
that well that's what we're going to try and find 
out this is a consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in 
our childhood and have repeated to other children since we have been grown up 
we have all of us sobbed so piteously standing with tiny bare legs above our 
socks when we lost sight of our mother or nurse in some strange place look at 
the nurse there that's a class issue as well mother or nurse but we can no 
longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over it as we do over the 
remembered sufferings of f-, of five or ten years ago now actually when you 
think about it this is a very very odd passage because the narrator is saying 
we can't remember this after she's just told you she remembers it this is the 
problem of language and memory every single text negotiates this problem and 
most particularly if it is a first person narration if you are talking in the i 
you'll see this with Pip in Great Expectations next year on your Dickens course 
you'll see this with Jane Eyre i'm 
going to look at in a moment for those of you who are reading Jane Eyre or have 
read Jane Eyre er Villette Lucy Snow any i narrated novel has a problem the i 
so-called writing the novel course again it's not the author but the narrator 
is supposedly writing the novel is writing about themselves in the past it's 
therefore already a split self do you remember this you try thinking back to 
you know just as a theory again not 'cause it's a psychological truth but just 
so you can see the problem here if someone says to you are you exactly the same 
now as when you were four it already presupposes doesn't it that there are two 
kinds of you one who is four and one who is who you are now and it's asking you 
to draw links between those two and i i suppose a lot of you will give 
differing answers some of you might say yes yes i'm still exactly the same 
person s-, and some of you might say no i'm not like that at all and others 
might say i don't remember frankly don't 
know you might like to test it for yourself but the idea that these are somehow 
ways of thinking we all share i think are clearly not the case but it's also 
not what the text is interested in the text isn't interested in proving this is 
how things work it's interested in raising questions about consciousness and 
language and memory so it creates a paradox the narrator who says you cannot 
remember this i cannot remember this but i've just told you what i cannot 
remember because of the problem of the i narration and we'll see this coming up 
every single i narrator text you look for it you'll see this problem every one 
of those key moments has left its trace and lives in us still but such traces 
have blent themselves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth and 
manhood now gets even more bizarre this is a female narrator talking about 
manhood often happens with gender incidentally and so it comes that we can look 
on at the troubles of our children with a 
smiling disbelief in the reality of their pain look at that in one sentence we 
look on with a smiling disbelief in the reality of their pain this narrator has 
gone one step beyond the narrator of Laura and Harry she's not just sitting in 
the child's consciousness as it were taking the perspective she's created as 
the child's consciousness she's actually able to say i know it all i know it 
all i know what i'm like now i know what i was like then you don't know nobody 
else knows but i know and even then i say i don't know but i really do 'cause 
i've just said it so in one sentence she knows there is a real pain reality of 
their pain same time she says smiling disbelief is there anyone the narrator 
asks i mean this is really quite er er a very very strong example of the is 
there anyone who can recover the experience of his childhood not merely within 
memory of what he did and what happened to him of what he liked and disliked 
when he was in frock and 
trousers but with an intimate penetration a revived consciousness of what he 
felt then when it was so long from one midsummer to the other this narrator is 
raising for you the problem of memory that is to say how adults create 
childhood what this narrator is illustrating asking you to notice is that she 
is saying this is what childhood is while at the same time saying none of us 
can remember it and yet that's what she's claiming we do all the time and it 
has to do with the way in all of Eliot's novels there is a strong interest in 
an idea of empathy there is a morality based on the idea of being able to try 
and feel what another person feels and on the other hand realizing that that is 
impossible it's a very particular kind of moral view which the novels rework in 
many ways including with this idea of the problem of childhood but it's also 
pointing out that childhood can only ever be remembered 'cause even with for 
instance children's books who writes children's books 
adults isn't it they're all written by adults so the whole idea that adults can 
become children again is being questioned by this narrator and at the same time 
it's being said every adult creates a story about their own childhood recreates 
a concept of what childhood is but it's a problem er i'll give you a parallel 
see if this makes sense to you er it's the same idea the narrator's working on 
here is the problem of pain i don't know if anyone of you have been unfortunate 
enough to ever have suffered severe pain i hope not but i'm i'm afraid perhaps 
with some of you that may be the case there's a problem with remembering pain 
but it's also in a sense a salvation it's very difficult that if you remember 
pain to feel it again if you would every time you thought about pain you'd had 
in the past you would re-experience it that would be pretty terrible wouldn't 
it you'd never be able you m-, you might remember the pain you might say ooh it 
was awful it was awful it felt like 
my like my leg was being chopped off or something but if you would really f-, 
really feel it every time that's what this passage is exploring the paradox of 
memory being just memory and on the other hand that's the only thing there is 
if you look back and say like i said before what were you like when you were 
four you'll probably have some sort of story about that unless you really are 
someone who says i don't remember and there are plenty of people who really 
don't but if you have some idea it only a memory you don't become four years 
old again 
mm i don't know if people sitting here being four or with er so this is what 
this text is pondering this recreation so it creates a language about childhood 
which is not childhood it revives it but does not feel it again it describes it 
but it cannot be it and yet that's the only way it can be it that's the paradox 
it's also the interesting thing here again that Maggie what is meant to be a 
rhetorical passage also alerting us to the idea that Maggie is a particular 
child a particular kind of child of this sort has all those real pains at the 
same time it's argued that this is about a boy why is a boy used a he to talk 
about a girl another question what he felt when his school fellows shut him out 
of their game because he would pitch the ball wrong out of mere wilfulness or 
on a rainy day in the holidays and we get a whole list of ideas where this 
remembering remembering comes from what it is to remember 
in fact it's another thing the novel meditates again and again and again the 
idea of remembering and memory again if any of you are working on this in 
seminars look at the start of The Mill on the Floss the whole narrative is a 
memory a remembering by the narrator notice that and you'll see that this 
passage again is all about what it means to tell your own life to recall to 
retell your life okay does that make sense do you see how this would come up 
not just in relation to childhood but i-, in relation to any narration which 
has to tell the story of the past so i'm using childhood as a specific example 
but you could use it for any narrator who looks back and tells this history of 
themselves or even the history of others by the way Jane Eyre's the next 
passage i've got to give you an example of here classic i narrator and i'll 
just point you to when i said before i think we've talked a bit now about 
memory but also the problem of language which comes into this i want 
to think again about how can you find a language for something which doesn't 
have a language of its own how can you find a consciousness formulate a 
consciousness with something which does not express its own consciousness 
because childhood in these texts a bit like in the George Eliot is seen as 
something which cannot speak itself cannot say itself er i'll tell you what 
this is about this is about the notion of innocence if you say i am innocent 
are you still innocent i don't mean innocent in the terms of guilty or innocent 
in court where but i mean if you say to yourself oh i'm such an innocent it's 
all you can't even say it as a straight statement can you it's a contradiction 
in terms if you know about your own innocence you're knowledgeable you're no 
longer innocent it's a paradox er Blake for those of you who are working at all 
or have been working or will work on poetry of Blake when he does the Songs of 
Innocence and Experience this is exactly 
what the poems do they illustrate that you cannot write innocence because a 
poem which goes i'm innocent is no longer innocent and the poetry meditates 
that problem all the time so the notion of how do you find the language which 
can talk about th-, the state of an innocent childhood a childhood which is 
postulated as having no language about itself if you have a a two year old who 
comes up to you and says i'm a child i am an innocent child what would you 
think about that you might want to think about that okay page forty-seven this 
is the second page Jane has been fi-, famous scene some of you may know Jane 
has been sent off for having a tantrum to the red room and she's terrified of 
the red room because her uncle died there so she sits there because John her 
cousin has hit her and she says on page forty-seven half way down what a 
consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon see this is all past tense 
it has to be past tense because it's the adult Jane writing 
her past how all of my brain was in tumult and a-, all my heart in insurrection 
yet in what darkness what dense ignorance was the mental battle fought i could 
not answer the ceaseless inward question why i thus suffered now at a distance 
of i will not say how many years i see it clearly so here we are the adult Jane 
commenting on her past self saying she kept asking herself why she suffered but 
she didn't know then what she knows now she didn't know then this is the 
paradox of the moving back and forth between the idea of the unself-conscious 
innocent child which is being constructed here the child who simply feels and 
this is an angry little girl being described here but it's still an anger which 
is unself-conscious and it moves to the adult Jane saying i know i felt that 
way then but i didn't know what the answers were but i know now what the 
answers were to what i felt then though i didn't know those were the question 
and the text does this all the time 
mediating the question of what is truth what is experience what is memory what 
is identity how do you create a story of yourself and what are the conditions 
for that story and here in this sense i could not answer the ceaseless inward 
question why i thus suffered now at a distance of i will not say how many years 
i see it clearly the passage repeats this move this questioning i was in 
discord in Gateshead Hall it proceeds to give the answer which it couldn't give 
then so it looks back and it says well this was what was going on i didn't know 
it then but i know it now about my position then i was in discord at Gateshead 
Hall i was like nobody there i had nothing in common er sorry nothing in 
harmony with Mrs Reed or her children or her chosen vassalage if they did not 
love me in fact as little did i love them they were not bound to regard with 
affection a thing that could not sympathize with one amongst them this is not 
what the little Jane knows this is what the adult Jane 
looking back and analysing her situation at that time comes back to and 
analyses at that point so that idea coming back creating your past self 
retelling it reformulating it giving it a language it didn't have at the time 
giving it a consciousness and a self-consciousness it did not have at the time 
that's another theme there perhaps to think about that problem of language i 
see we're running slightly out of time so i'll just point you towards what er 
the last two bits on the handout do er the one is a passage from Anne Bronte's 
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall i think an extremely interesting text which isn't 
studied enough but that's my personal view er i just put in this passage just 
to point you towards it er first of all what er this passage does it's Mrs 
Graham a mother talking about her son with a man Mr Markham and they're talking 
about the raising of boys and girls and something very interesting is going on 
here because the text takes apart the organic 
metaphor about childhood what we see is that in some texts again a childhood an 
idea of childhood is created which makes childhood like a plant it grows it's 
an organic metaphor it's a metaphor which is used even nowadays about childhood 
again the idea that the child is like a plant it grows it has developmental 
phases you can't stop them it just happens we have no evidence for any of this 
the whole idea about childhood in phases is an extremely muddled language and 
psychologists spend a lot of time arguing and discussing this but it's a 
metaphor for an idea of growth and childhood it's postulated as a time of 
growth again not an inevitable idea but one which we find in this text and what 
this er Mrs Graham does is show that this org-, organic metaphor first of all 
is a metaphor she takes it apart she does not accept it as an inevitable 
description of natural childhood and secondly she analyses it as a heavily 
gendered metaphor Mr Markham keeps saying you should expose 
your little boy to all kinds of temptations like alcohol because that will make 
him strong that will make him know what he ought to resist and then er Mrs 
Graham says and should i do that with little girls as well if it had been a 
little girl should i do then and he said oh no no of course not you shouldn't 
give a little girl alcohol and cigarettes and whatever you no no no very bad 
idea and she says well why not a little girl and why a little boy does that 
mean little girls are so weak they can't resist and he ends up of course all 
the time getting more and more upset because everything he says she takes she 
analyses as being an extremely sexist position which basically says little 
girls must be kept away as little hothouse flowers but little boys must be 
rough and exposed to the elements and become strong men and she completely 
takes the position apart so you might want to look at that if you're interested 
in that kind of issue er i think it's a text which er 
does that in a in a very unusual way and the last one comes from another 
children's book and i don't mind by the way what you call these texts 
children's books or adult texts er it doesn't really matter er they're just 
publishers' categories er and this one is from George MacDonald's At the Back 
of the North Wind and you might want to look here how at the end of this text 
when the little boy who's the hero of the story called Diamond who is the 
epitome of the pure innocent and spiritual child dies and this is a metaphor 
that happens in a great many texts the idea of the child being so pure that it 
must die to avoid contamination Oliver Twist is another example where er the 
friend of Oliver the little boy dies and the that death is a is a perfect 
spiritual moment so this idea here if you look at it is you will see that this 
little boy is so perfect that the narrator of this text goes a step beyond even 
the other narrators we've looked at and completely claims that only he and 
this little boy are perfect are spiritually perfect he completely identifies 
with the perfect position of childhood he is the adult who has become a child 
again because childhood in this text is absolute perfection so i hope what i've 
talked about a little bit today of showing you both that childhood carries a 
whole load of ideological weights in terms of moral positions ethical positions 
er ideas about memory and consciousness and gender and that all of these issues 
are crucial to the reading of fiction in general thanks for your attention