Language and the Child in the Letters of the Romantics

Abstract

Critiques on the subject of the child in the Romantic period continue to be guided by the notion of the idealized child of romanticism, and themes related to it, such as childhood as a privileged time of innocence and the child as a symbol of hope. The result is that discussions on childhood often remain circumscribed within the paradigms of romanticism; furthermore, they are largely based on poetry, a genre that affords primacy to the image, thereby reinforcing the Romantic aesthetic of the self-sufficient, innocent child. The letters of the Romantics are a rich source of material on the subject of children but have largely remained an unexplored territory. My aim in this essay is to question this unproblematic construction of the child in the Romantic period though a close reading of the letters and journals of the Romantics with an eye to how the narrator-parent constructs the child.  A close reading of the letters of canonical and non-canonical Romantic writers reveals that the child in the letters of the Romantics, like any other character in a text, is a construction by the parent/narrator, and reflects to a large extent the parents’ interests, attitudes and dilemmas. Furthermore, contrary to Wordsworth’s reputation as the poet of childhood par excellence, it is Coleridge and not Wordsworth who emerges as the poet of childhood in our critical survey of the letters of Romantic authors.