IELTS Research Reports

Anthony Green and Roger HawkeyExperienced Group: WilliamTextThe changing image of childhood in English literatureA Childhood as an important theme of English literature did not exist before the last decadesof the eighteenth century and the poetry of Blake and Wordsworth. There were of coursechildren in English literature before then, as the subject of lyrics and complimentaryverses. But in drama, the main body of poetry and the novel, the child is virtually orentirely absent.B With Blake and Wordsworth we are confronted with an essentially new phenomenon,that of major poets expressing something they considered of great significance throughthe image of the child. In time, the child became the central figure of an increasinglysignificant proportion of English literature. The concept of the child’s nature whichinformed the work of Blake and Wordsworth was that children were naturally innocent,and were slowly corrupted by the society in which they lived - in contradiction to the longChristian tradition that everyone, child and adult alike, is sinful.C The nineteenth century saw the beginnings of a spiritual crisis. The securities of theeighteenth-century peace dissolved in the era of revolution, leading to social and politicalferment. The social, political, and, more especially, the intellectual problems arising fromthe French and Industrial Revolutions found no resolution. In a rapidly dissolving culture,the nineteenth-century artist faced alienation. The concern of the modern Europeanintellect has been, in part, the maintenance of individual integrity within the search for thesecurity of universal order. At no time has that maintenance and search been so pressingin its demand as in the nineteenth century, when long-accepted ideas were challenged notonly by the upheavals mentioned above, but also by the revolutionary thinking of Darwin,Marx and Freud.D The society created by the industrial developments of the late eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies was increasingly unconcerned with and often hostile to art. The novelist CharlesDickens was the last major English writer to have a really successful public voice, inthe mid 1800s. By the end of the century, there was a new literate public who wereunresponsive to the best creative work. A new mass literature supplied the demandsof uninformed literacy; and the relative influence of the mature creative voice wasproportionally diminished. Art was on the run; the ivory tower had become the substitutefor the wished-for public arena.E In this context of isolation, alienation, doubt and intellectual conflict, it is not difficult tosee the attraction of the child as a literary theme. The child could serve as a symbol of theartist’s dissatisfaction with the society which was in process of such harsh developmentabout him or her. In a world given increasingly to utilitarian values and the machine, thechild could become the symbol of imagination and sensibility, of nature set against theforces in society actively de-naturing humanity. Through the child the artist could expressawareness of the conflict between human innocence and the cumulative pressures ofsocial experience, and protest against the horrors of that experience.364 www.ielts.org