Katherine Wakely-Mulroney

This collection gives sustained attention to the literary dimensions of children’s poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. While reasserting the importance of well-known voices, such as those of Isaac Watts, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, A. A. Milne, and Carol Ann Duffy, the contributors also reflect on the aesthetic significance of landmark works by less frequently celebrated figures such as Richard Johnson, Ann and Jane Taylor, Cecil Frances Alexander and Michael Rosen. Scholarly treatment of children’s poetry has tended to focus on its publication history rather than to explore what comprises – and why we delight in – its idiosyncratic pleasures. And yet arguments about how and why poetic language might appeal to the child are embroiled in the history of children’s poetry, whether in Isaac Watts emphasising the didactic efficacy of “like sounds,” William Blake and the Taylor sisters revelling in the beauty of semantic ambiguity, or the authors of nonsense verse jettisoning sense to thrill their readers with the sheer music of poetry. Alive to the ways in which recent debates both
echo and repudiate those conducted in earlier periods, The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry investigates the stylistic and formal means through which children’s poetry, in theory and in practice, negotiates the complicated demands we have made of it through the ages.

Lewis Carroll studies treats investigations into the author’s sexuality as outmoded, even unscholarly. This is partly a response to the speculative biographical criticism and media coverage of the 1990s and early 2000s, which placed undue emphasis on his alleged pedophilia. In their efforts to provide a more nuanced, historically contextualized vision of Carroll’s child-friendships, modern critics have tended to either dismiss any allegation of impropriety or treat the subject as a perpetually open question. Both positions foreground the availability and interpretation of evidence, and raise questions concerning scholarly expertise and gatekeeping. This essay argues for a new understanding of what evidence concerning Carroll’s sexuality entails. I identify a shared organizational ethos between his two-part novel Sylvie and Bruno (1889-1893) and the journals composed during his annual summer holidays in Eastbourne. The diaries record Carroll's ongoing efforts to define the kinds of domestic intimacies that were possible between men and girls; the novel likewise explores the various relationships that could connect adults with children – familial, spiritual, romantic, and sexual. The volume of evidence contained in these sources, which amount to thousands of pages, has to be examined quantitatively as well as qualitatively. Carroll’s increasingly energetic and experimental attempts to structure and legitimise his desires through writing is itself a form of evidence, one that is cumulative and suggestive rather than singular and definitive. This evidence points to an erotic obsession with children that was unsettling even by the standards of his own time.

The diary of Opal Whiteley, putatively written during the author's childhood (c. 1903-1904), was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1920. Whiteley's naïve observations concerning life in an Oregon logging camp are relayed in an idiosyncratic patois characterized by the use of rhythmic repetition, additive style, and musical sequences in which sound is prioritized over semantic meaning. Questions concerning the diary's authenticity were raised almost immediately in the wake of its initial publication, with many suspecting that it was not the work of a child, but that of a young woman with a keen sense of public taste. The mystery surrounding Whiteley's text has tended to obscure its status as a work of literary significance. This essay asks not whether the diary was written by a child, but why its intricate, incantatory language suggests, at times, that it could have been. Drawing on the fields of child prosody and children's poetry, I examine the metrical and syntactic structures that contribute to our sense of the work as both pleasingly childlike, in its sing-song inflections, yet reassuring childish in its juvenility. In so doing, I suggest that Whiteley's text blurs the boundary between child's diary and children's poem, cultural artifact and aesthetic experiment.

While much has been done to critique the conventional opposition between instruction and delight in the history of children's literature, more attention is needed at a formal level to the ways in which instructional texts strive towards delightfulness, ease, and comprehensibility. Identifying 'littleness' as a key critical concept, this essay explores the diverse ways in which early children's books were scaled to the level of a child's understanding, as well as his or her potentially short life span. Beginning with two books bound together in the British Library, each modelling distinct notions of what it means to be 'little' in a textual sense, the essay focuses on Isaac Watts's graduated Catechisms (1730), which seek to simplify the theological and linguistic complexity of the Westminster Assembly's Shorter Catechism of 1647 while preserving its compendiousness. While catechism is traditionally conceived of in terms of its formal and ideological inflexibility, I argue that Watts's text is designed to inculcate an inquisitive and riddling, rather than exclusively dutiful, mode of reading. This is evidenced at a formal as well as a theoretical level, in the relationship between individual questions and answers and between component stages of Watts's graduated programme.

Whether abandoning her sister's book on the riverbank or discarding "Jabberwocky " in a state of confusion, Alice's adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass begin when reading ends. Yet Carroll's attitude towards the activity of reading was considerably more nuanced than his best-known works initially suggest. His writings on the subject betray an unmistakable emphasis on systematic perusal and the mechanics of textual storage and retrieval, the dual processes through which books are preserved in memory. These fixations emerge in fin-de-siècle musings on reading located in " Feeding the Mind " (1884), Symbolic Logic (1896), and the understudied Sylvie and Bruno books (1889, 1893), which combine a taxonomic interest in the strategies through which books may be lengthened, condensed, or multiplied with a surprisingly intent exploration of the moral and spiritual benefits of reading. This essay examines two potentially oppositional modes of textual engagement in Carroll's late writings: resolute perusal designed to acquire information securely, with minimum wasted effort or time, and a comparatively meditative practice in which works are scanned or rehearsed perpetually, whether to reify their contents or withstand " anxious " and " unholy " thoughts. Carroll's preoccupations with the material and conceptual density of books and the time available in which to read them manifest themselves in the unique form and thematic scope of Sylvie and Bruno and its sequel, which this essay reads as a Borgesian " total book".

The pedagogy of Isaac Watts, a self-styled devotee of Locke, is defined by a preoccupation with the dimensions and relative accessibility of human interiority. His instructional texts for children and adults centre on the transmission of information between the reader's interiorised self and the external world. While Watts's texts for adults stress the voluntary nature of this transmission, his texts for children suggest that the conduit between interior and exterior may be wilfully obstructed. Using the figure of the lying child, I explore the possibility that child interiority was, for Watts, an object of fear.

In their efforts to establish children’s literature as a distinct genre, eighteenth-century writers and publishers tailored their texts to the unique needs of young readers. This chapter considers how these negotiations reflect different attitudes towards children’s small bodies, limited life experience, and comparatively narrow understandings when modern conceptions of childhood were still developing. Though books for young people needed to be shorter and more syntactically straightforward than those written for adults, children’s authors were adamant that their works should not be viewed as inferior. Embracing the concept of multum in parvo (much in little), figures such as John Newbery, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Ellenor Fenn demonstrated that the simplicity of children’s literature was the product of complex aesthetic, pedagogical, and commercial underpinnings. Early children’s books regularly pointed lessons in the subjectivity and mutability of scale, framing young readers as “little giants” whose unruly growth sent them skyrocketing, showing how childish egoism produced an overinflated sense of self, or using Tom Thumb as a model for how greatness might reside within littleness. This chapter also attends to the style of children’s literature, exploring stories written in words of one syllable and short forms such as fables and couplets.

In a journal entry written shortly before Sylvie and Bruno (1889) was published, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson described the novel's history as " one of perpetual oscillation! " (Diaries 8: 488). Dodgson—better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll— was referring to the text's delayed publication. Yet this exclamatory remark aptly summarises the formal and thematic characteristics of the novel itself. Sylvie and Bruno, together with its sequel, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), oscillates between a linear narrative and a disconnected series of episodes, a children's fairy story and an adult morality tale, and, as this chapter will examine, poetry and prose. In the preface to volume one, Carroll jokingly refers to the text as a work of " litterature " [sic] in order to describe the chaotic assortment of episodes and ideas from which the work took its shape (x). Critics such as Jean Gattégno and Gilles Deleuze have argued, however, that focusing on the fragmentary, disjointed aspects of Sylvie and Bruno may lead us to overlook the novel's literary cohesion. Deleuze puts forward the Möbius strip and replica of Fortunatus's Purse that appear in the second volume as fitting emblems of the novel's coherence (11); " There can be no better way, " Gattégno concurs, " of saying that. .. multiplicity is unity " (173). Indeed, Sylvie and Bruno transitions continually, often imperceptibly, between child-and adult-oriented themes—just as one might slide along the non-orientable surface of the Möbius strip and Fortunatus's legendary purse. But these emblems belie the deliberately discordant aspects of the novel: Carroll often exaggerates the distance between playfulness and piety in order to point a lesson in both morality and taxonomy. The thaumatrope—a nineteenth-century optical toy in which separate components of a single image are brought together by rotating a disc back and forth—seems a more fitting symbol of the unity of the Sylvie and Bruno books, since that unity is achieved through stark transition and continual exchange between child and adult themes, poetry and prose. Though Sylvie and Bruno's ponderous, moralising plot lacks the thaumatrope's lively energy, the poems interspersed throughout both volumes supply [end of p. 74] the text's momentum. Stanzas often herald an abrupt transition between child-and adult-oriented story lines, propelling the narrative forward while encouraging the reader to flip back through the pages of the text in order to ascertain the relationship between alternating segments. While the narrative shifts between juvenile and mature themes, Sylvie and Bruno's poems exhibit features that tend to be associated with children's verse: the majority are comic, nonsensical, or cloyingly sentimental and adhere to the regular, brisk rhythmic patterns similar to those which appear in contemporary verse by Christina Rossetti (Sing-Song [1872]) and Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book [1894, 1895]). Unlike Rossetti's book of poems or Kipling's collection of short fiction (in which verse appears far more often between stories than within them), Sylvie and Bruno's poetry is tightly interlinked with the surrounding prose narrative. The interplay between these playful, childlike poems and Sylvie and Bruno's earnest and often philosophically driven narrative is, I argue, suggestive of a more complex relationship between the text's dual addressees, the child and adult reader. Focusing on two poems in particular— " Little Birds, " stanzas of which demarcate and comment on the linear progress of a longer narrative poem, and " The Mad Gardener's Song, " an incantatory, cyclical poem which reflects and even anticipates aspects of the prose narrative—this chapter asserts the

An online annotated edition featuring twelve Lewis Carroll scholars taking one chapter each, plus new artwork and remixes from classic 1865 and 1905 illustrations. A joint project from The Public Domain Review and Medium, on the occasion of the story’s 150th anniversary