Journal of Juvenilia Studies
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Collaboration in Collections
Get PDFThis essay presents a rough outline of the “what, how, and why” of the collaborative work done in English 425: “Literature, Archives, and Original Research,” an intensive research undergraduate course at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Fall 2024 that focused on juvenilia. The team included a class of thirteen undergraduates (all years; all majors), five PhD students from English and Comparative Literature, one professor from the same department, instructional specialists from Ackland Art Museum, and librarians galore from Wilson Library Special Collections and Davis Library, all at UNC Chapel Hill. We met with two or three museum and four or five library colleagues; but many others, behind the scenes, made our course possible.Eight members of this team tell their story from the points of view of four students, three librarians, and the professor. The projects the class undertook show what can happen when participants believe in each other as partners. They also show how young researchers occupy an exceptional position when it comes to considering what young artists and authors care about and why it matters
Isobel Grundy reviews the Juvenilia Press\u27s 2024 edition of Harrison Ainsworth\u27s December Tales.
No full textEditorial
Get PDFThis is the Editorial for the Journal of Juvenilia Studies, vol. 7, no. 1 (June 2025)
Class Acts: Juvenilia, John Ruskin, and the Humanities Today
Get PDFThe paper explores the teaching of juvenilia in the context of an ongoing crisis in the humanities, arguing the need to introduce university students to the study of child writing by including it when studying non-juvenile texts, as distinct from staging a separate course on it. It offers examples of teaching John Ruskin’s juvenilia with his mature work but also with romanticism more generally. Ruskin’s early poetry can be read as evasive, the young writer cutting himself off from examining his feelings as they emerge in the writing process, especially as he documents what might be very personal topics such as his interactions with his parents and his developing maturation. The paper argues that students reading Ruskin’s juvenilia will have insights into The King of the Golden River, a mature work, and the masculinities it represents because it too refuses to pursue difficult themes. In a similar way, his juvenilia can be used in the undergraduate classroom to enhance understandings of romanticism in that the evasiveness in Ruskin’s poetry can be read as the consequence of Ruskin’s reading of the romantics and especially the image of the romantic child as developed in Wordsworth’s verse. Though the paper is on pedagogy and juvenilia, most of it consists of an analysis of Ruskin’s early verse
Lois Burke reviews Mya-Rose Craig\u27s Birdgirl;
No full textLois M. Burke reviews Mya-Rose Craig\u27s The Birdgirl
Table of Contents
No full textThis is the Table of Contents for the Journal of Juvenilia Studies vol. 7, no. 1 (June 2025)
Fat Books, Coloured Pencils, Nibs and Ink: Teaching the Juvenile Journal
No full textThe Diary of Anne Frank is a salient example of how valuable a youthful journal can be historically, as well as for access to the child’s subjectivity and creativity. This essay suggests that juvenile journals can provide excellent matter for a specialized course on the genre.
With a focus on the young writer’s need for necessary writing materials, the author examines journals by a number of young diarists of different periods: Marjory Fleming, writing in Regency Scotland, who died at eight years old, but still made it into the Dictionary of National Biography; the teenage Richard Doyle, already developing his artistic talents and turning professional in the busy London in 1840; Elizabeth Thompson Butler, struggling to achieve recognition as a Victorian female painter of battle scenes; Iris Vaughan, writing in South Africa at the time of the Boer War; seven-year-old Opal Whiteley, still on the threshold of literacy, recording her close encounters with animal life in the logging camps of Oregon in the early twentieth century; and teenager Hope Hook, recounting her crossing of Canada in 1907, as part of her family’s move to emigrate; and up to Anne Frank, a teenager in the Second World War.
These young writers, artists, and budding professionals provide vivid insights into their thinking and writing processes, as well as windows on the history and culture of their day as perceived by a child.
(Re)Constructions, Abstractions and Reductions: Readings of the Child-Author in The Adventures of Alice Laselles by Alexandrina Victoria (aged 10 ¾)
No full textIn 2015, the British Royal Collection republished one of Queen Victoria’s childhood stories: Alice (c.1835) and renamed it as The Adventures of Alice Laselles (2015). Along with its new title, the text was given a new ending, new illustrations, and a number of in-text edits including the alteration of the lead character’s surname. These edits were crowned, no pun intended, by the cover matter which proclaimed the story as being written by both “Alexandrina Victoria aged 10 ¾” and “Queen Victoria”. In this article, I discuss the impact of these interventions upon both Alice and The Adventures of Alice Laselles, and show how they have come to construct, reconstruct, and reduce the body of the child author. I suggest that The Adventures of Alice Laselles, rather than telling the story of Alice herself, instead documents the impact of adult bodily interventions upon a child-authored text
A Spirit of the Age: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1822-26 Notebook, Romantic Writers, and the Commonplace Book Tradition
Get PDFThis essay turns a spotlight on Elizabeth Barret Barrett\u27s unpublished 1822-26 notebook (now in Wellesley College Library). A seldom-cited archival text, the 231-page notebook opens a window on Romantic culture and writers in the years it spans. It also illumines the intellectual and artistic formation of the gifted juvenile author who would become England’s most internationally influential woman poet by 1850 under the name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The notebook includes drafts of original compositions, memoranda (for example, “Stray Thoughts,” “List of Books I wish to have”), and extracts or analyses documenting EBB’s self-education through wide-ranging reading across genres, fields, and national boundaries. The largest category of entries is made up of review-like commentaries, principally on recently published books, in which EBB hones a critical voice shaped by the periodical press of the period. Writers treated range from major literary figures like Lord Byron, Letitia Landon, Madame de Staël, and Mary Shelley, to others influential or emerging at the time (e.g., Robert Southey, James Hogg, Anna Jameson, James Fenimore Cooper), to authors of memoirs, biographies, histories, and works of political philosophy. Examination of the hybrid form as well as the mixed contents of the notebook indicates that it both participates in the commonplace book tradition and reflects Romantic transformations in that tradition exemplified by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notebooks. In the process, EBB’s 1822-26 notebook offers a perspective on the mid-1820s very different from William Hazlitt’s in The Spirit of the Age (1824-25); it also demonstrates the budding acumen as a literary critic later expressed in her contributions to Richard Hengist Horne’s A New Spirit of the Age (1844). Notably too, the notebook underscores the cosmopolitanism and engagement with contemporary subject matter that underpins her later artistic practice, especially in her representation of “this live, throbbing” modern age in Aurora Leigh (1856)
Recusatio, Prolepsis, and Popular Sentiment in Tennyson\u27s Juvenilia
No full textTennyson’s early poems in Poems, by Two Brothers is remarkable for its insistence on maturity, a feature that Laurie Langbauer calls prolepsis, evident in an advertisement for this volume, presumably a jointly written by Alfred and Charles, in which the two brothers boldly announce their entry into the profession of poetry: “But so it is: we have passed the Rubicon, and we leave the rest to fate; though its edict may create a fruitless regret that we ever emerged from ‘the shade,’ and courted notoriety” (Tennyson and Tennyson, Advertisement). With this language and their subsequent volume of poems, Charles and Alfred Tennyson participate in a common schoolboy tradition of writing poetry as if already imagining themselves fully fledged poets. Moreover, in announcing their crossing of the Rubicon and “submitting to the microscopic eye of periodical Criticism” (ibid.), they strategically decide to disavow their youthful influences by means of the classical rhetorical strategy of recusatio.
Yet while both Tennyson brothers participate in the normative schoolboy tradition of writing poetry in imitation of classical Greek and Latin poets, Alfred’s imitation also extends into the vogue for sentimental literature, including the gothic, that was popularized in Tennyson’s boyhood in such novels as Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic romances and in gift books, poetry albums, and literary annuals like the Keepsake and the Forget-Me-Not. In so combining his schoolboy training in classical poetry with his reading of popular sentimental and Romantic literature, which were generally considered feminine and commercial, Tennyson forges a distinctive poetic voice and effectively launches himself into the vocation of poetry.