Journal of Juvenilia Studies
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Edmund Gosse\u27s "Tristram Jones" (c. 1872), and the Legacy of the Maternal Portrait
No full textEdmund Gosse broke the mould of nineteenth-century life writing with his study of family relationships, Father and Son (1907), a book now widely recognised as having made a crucial intervention in the transition from Victorian to modern forms of biography. Modern academic interest in Father and Son was first stimulated by the 1970s rise of auto/biographical studies, and the book has continued to attract attention from a wide range of disciplines. Father and Son has, however, never been approached through the lens of Gosse’s juvenilia. Amongst Gosse’s papers archived at Cambridge University Library is a manuscript entitled “Tristram Jones” (c. 1872). Written when he was twenty-two, it contains ideas and imagery that anticipate Father and Son, and both narratives, strikingly, conclude with a gesture of freedom. At the end of “Tristram Jones,” the eponymous protagonist celebrates having extricated himself from an incompatible engagement, and looks forward to the single-minded pursuit of an aesthetic career. Similarly, in Father and Son, Gosse rejects a parentally-determined life of Christian service to devote himself to a literary vocation. A shift from limitation to liberation thus structures both texts. Against this background, my focus in this essay is on Gosse’s importation into “Tristram Jones” of a chain of conflicting emotions and memories impelled by a material object, namely, a portrait of his mother, Emily, painted in 1831 when she was twenty-four. Gosse’s imaginative deployment of this portrait into his 1872 fiction has a powerfully unsettling impact, one which, as I shall show, he reintroduced four decades later into his 1912 Booklover’s edition of Father and Son
Present and yet absent, bodied and yet bodiless: the paradoxical dyads of "Bramshill, being the Memoirs of Joan Penelope Cope" (1938)
Get PDFIn 1937, triggered by the imminent sale of her ancestral home Bramshill, Joan Penelope Cope wrote and illustrated her memoirs: "Bramshill, being the Memoirs of Joan Elizabeth Cope". She was twelve years old at time of writing, thirteen upon publication, and her book was “never intended for publication”. It was, nevertheless, published to vocal acclaim both nationally and internationally with critics lauding Cope\u27s achievement both on a literary and artistic level. Yet as much as these readings celebrated Cope, they also worked to remove her from her own text due to a preoccupation with Bramshill and its cultural legacy. In this piece I examine the impact of that preoccupation and recognise how Cope herself often contributed towards it through her own anticipatory aesthetic. I conclude that the often paradoxical demands placed upon both author and text result in Cope being read as something of a \u27ghost\u27, both present and absent, bodied and yet bodiless, within her own work. 
The Letters of John H. Crowder
No full textIn the midst of the American Civil War, sixteen-year-old John H. Crowder, a free person of color, penned a series of letters that offer insight into the experiences, hopes, obstacles, and discrimination faced by young African Americans during the nineteenth century. Serving in the Louisiana Native Guard, one of the Union’s pioneering regiments that welcomed people of color, Crowder writes to declare his youthful ambitions and his unwavering resilience against his often disapproving superior officers. Additionally, within these letters Crowder’s profound love for his mother and a female friend is revealed, along with his determination to secure a stable future for the women in his life. The preservation of Crowder’s letters, alongside the story of his mother\u27s pursuit of a military pension after Crowder’s death, brings to light the oft-overlooked contributions and experiences of African Americans in the post-Antebellum South.
In this “Spotlight on Juvenilia,” I delve into the story behind the preservation of Crowder’s letters, exploring the unique challenges and triumphs experienced by young African Americans, as well as their significant role in shaping the Civil War narrative. Moreover, I emphasize the importance of amplifying diverse historical perspectives, particularly those of youth and people of color. By shedding light on the interplay between personal agency and societal constraints for Crowder, this exploration underscores the significance of his community’s voices in reshaping historical discourses and highlights the far-reaching implications of their experiences during this pivotal period in history
The "unseen land of thought": Materializing Imagination and Creativity in the Brontës\u27 Miniature Books
Get PDFThrough the construction of their miniature books, the Brontës demonstrate the critical, dynamic relationship between inert matter and the"material imagination," as theorised by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. To make the books, the children drew on the resourceful things around their home: a range of literary matter that stimulated their imaginations and of paper scraps that they used to materialise it. This essay shows how all four Brontë children selected and creatively refashioned this material into their writing, crafting their own worlds with material and immaterial fragments. It demonstrates how scaling, and the process of miniaturisation were critical to their cognitive understanding, imaginative creativity, and writing practices; and it explains how their childhood imagination became a vital lifelong aspect of their identities that was always entangled with real life. Thus, the Brontës’ child-formed miniature books reflect Bachelard’s notion of imagination and matter awakening individuals to energy and agency.
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Jane Austen\u27s Youthful Art of Anticlimax
No full textJane Austen wrote three volumes of juvenilia, entitled Volume the First, Volume the Second, and Volume the Third. Most scholars agree that they were written between the ages of eleven and eighteen (1787-1783). These stories are hilarious and outrageous, particularly considering the understated decorum of her later novels. It is true, as Margaret Anne Doody claims, that these youthful writings “point in directions in which their author was later not permitted to go” (Doody, 103). Yet in many ways, these teenage writings nonetheless proleptically define her taste and mission in her mature works. This essay focuses on one aspect of her style in these teenage writings, as well as its afterlife in her later writings. In considering her use of anticlimax, this essay also suggests the ways in which this particular stylistic device or figure of speech shapes Austen\u27s greater mission and strategy as a novelist, suggesting continuity rather than discontinuity between the teenage writer and the mature author. In fact, the use of anticlimax is directly related to the critical disputes over Austen’s endings and whether or not she is impatient with conclusions in general
Reviews
Get PDFValerie Purton reviews Tristram Jones, by Edmund Gosse, edited by Kathy Rees and Christine Alexander (Juvenilia Press, 2022); Sarah Schaefer Walton reviews Henry Kirke White, 1785–1806, by Tim Fulton and others (https://kirkewhitecom.wordpress.com)
Materiality in John Ruskin\u27s Early Letters and Dialogues
No full textBetween 1827 and 1829, John Ruskin underwent a rite of passage to being admitted as a participant in his parents’ personal correspondence. Simultaneously, in his juvenilia, he composed dialogues between children and parents in imitation of conversations in Aikin and Barbauld’s Evenings at Home and in Maria Edgeworth’s Frank: A Sequel and Harry and Lucy Concluded. This article investigates how Ruskin’s management of fictional dialogues under his control intersected with his participation in family letters, which was managed by his parents, particularly his mother, Margaret Ruskin. She discouraged his preoccupation with the materiality of letter writing since, in her view, the purpose of family letters lay in sincere confession of feeling. At the same time, anxious that he uphold a respectful epistolary relationship with his father, Margaret consulted letter-writing manuals for rules to manage John’s epistolary rhetoric as well as material presentation. Ruskin subverted these constraints in his invented parent-child dialogues, by reversing or deflecting Barbauld’s and Edgeworth’ lessons of self-control and humility. Thus, Ruskin staked a place in his parents’ correspondence on his own terms, persisting in fashioning a distinctly material emphasis in his epistolary bond with his father
Invited Contributions: "Founding the Juvenilia Press," by Juliet McMaster, and "My Research in Juvenilia: Speech of Acknowledgement and Thanks," by Christine Alexander
No full textThis special section of invited contributions contains illustrated and expanded versions of the speeches given by Juliet McMaster and Christine Alexander during the Eighth International Literary Juvenilia Conference, held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on 14 June 2023, as part of a "Special Session to Honor Juliet McMaster and Christine Alexander." McMaster discusses the origins of the Juvenilia Press, which she founded, origins that were rooted in her interest in children\u27s writings. Alexander discusses the origins of her interest in literary juvenilia, beginning with her research and publication on the juvenilia of Charlotte Bronte, which was the foundation of her scholarly career and of her work with the Juvenilia Press, which she has directed for the past two decades