Journal of Juvenilia Studies
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From Juvenilia to Senilia: A Personal Case
Get PDFI apologise in advance for writing egocentrically. It is not my usual mode. But I was a juvenile writer, and I am a published author; and since my scholarship is often about childhood writings, I have paid attention to the connections between the juvenilia and the mature writings of the same author. Only recently, I turned my attention to those connections in my own case. And I was somewhat surprised by what I discovered. At least my self-examination will have the merit of coming from the horse’s mouth. To what extent my findings may apply to other authors, I am still investigating
Child Writing and the Traumatised Body
Get PDFTexts by young conflict survivors, including the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are worthy of historical and literary consideration on many fronts. How did young people experience, understand, and cope with damage to their bodies? What stigma did they face, and how did they make sense of their changed futures? How did they translate their experiences into prose, and how did they negotiate the meanings that such prose held within their societies? This essay suggests that juvenilia offers a deep well for other fields—trauma studies, the history of childhood, and even disability studies—to consider, and juvenilia studies might also incorporate new theoretical apparatuses that can help elucidate the personal, social, and political implications of young writers’ experiences of trauma and injury. Attention to children’s writing about their injuries may approach the asymptote of their trauma and offer insights for scholars working from numerous disciplinary points of origin.
Young England: Part Two
Get PDFPart One of this essay argued that the new field of juvenilia studies provides the explanatory framework that allows us to read what Young England does signify, and to indicate how the term “Young” signified in its time. More specifically, the recovery by juvenilia studies of the cultural presence of young people in Britain in the generation before Young England—its recovery of an active juvenile tradition of writers, simultaneous with and related to Romanticism—puts into context the self-fashioning and reception of this next post-Romantic generation: ambitious Young Englanders George Smythe (1818–57), John Manners (1818–1906), and Andrew Baillie-Cochrane (1816–90) in particular. Friends from boyhood, schoolmates at Eton and Cambridge, born into families of rank or on their way to titles, they looked to other bold young nobles who had made a splash before them—George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) and Percy Shelley (1792–1822). Those Romantics’ prior precocious fame provided the justification for believing that Young Englanders could make a splash too, and gave them the script for how to do so. Part Two focuses on Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), their political mentor, who used this script explicitly in his Coningsby novels about Young England, fusing the movement’s personalities with the characters of their meteoric Romantic predecessors
Making News:: A Girl, Her Printing Press, and the Civil War
Get PDFProduced between 1861 and 1866, the Penfield Extra resembles many nineteenth-century newspapers, with a notable exception. Nellie Williams, the paper’s founder and editor, began publishing her hometown weekly newspaper at the age of twelve. While her paper incorporates conventional modes of nineteenth-century journalism, it also disrupts this association through its indicators of a child’s gender, age, and self-expression. The resulting juxtapositions and fissures—between the editor embracing mainstream journalism and foregrounding her creative agency as a child—present a compelling window on child authorship during a tumultuous time in American history. This tension, moreover, exemplifies the ways by which children’s acts of authorship can dramatically unsettle cultural attitudes regarding children’s innocence and separateness from adult culture. The fact that Williams wrote and published amidst the culture-exploding Civil War was not coincidental. Drawing on established discourses and journalistic conventions while emphasising her free play as child author and newsmaker, Nellie’s Extra mimics cultural conventions and literary discourses requiring children’s obedience and innocence while also modeling the importance of children’s independent political engagement and their capacity to talk back to power
World Citizenship in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Juvenilia: Volcanoes, Hunger, and Politics of the Larder
Get PDFIn 1858 EBB declared her son Pen “shall be a ‘citizen of the world’ after my own heart & ready for the millennium.”[i] Living in Italy for most of the fifteen years of her married life and passionately supporting Italian unification and independence in her mature poetry, Elizabeth Barrett Browning proudly regarded herself as “a citizen of the world.” But world citizenship is a perspective toward which EBB[ii] strove in her juvenilia long before she employed the phrase. Much of her childhood writing expresses her compulsion to address social and political issues and to transcend national prejudices in doing so. Recent critics have illuminated EBB’s gender and political views in fascinating detail. Marjorie Stone, to cite one example, has ably traced EBB’s commitment to “a poetry of the present and ‘the Real’” and her “turn towards human and contemporary subjects, away from the self-confessedly mystical and abstract subject matter of her 1838 volume….”[iii] We should recognize, however, that a strong political impulse surfaces in even her earliest writings and in her recollections of childhood. Her letters from early childhood demonstrate her precocious interest in power negotiations between nations, and also between individual citizens and governments. At age six, for example, she informed her mother and father that “the Rusians has beat the french killd 18.000 men and taken 14000 prisners”--an account which, though mistakenly attributing victory to the wrong side, documents her early interest in the Napoleonic wars (31 August 1812, BC 1: 9). More telling for consideration of her aesthetic-political theory, her earliest known poem—composed in the month she turned six—in four lines critiques the British government’s policy of impressing civilians (even Americans) to serve in the British navy.[iv] Entitled “On the Cruelty of Forcement to Man: Alluding to the Press Gang” (1812), it suggests in its final two lines the viewer’s--specifically the extremely young female poet’s--responsibility to grapple with the moral and ethical implications of this military practice:
Ah! the poor lad in yonder boat,
Forced from his wife, his friends, his home,
Now gentle Maiden how can you,
Look at the misery of his doom![v]
Her last two lines pose a question that will shape her poetic career: How can you represent disturbing issues that demand your attention? Although her brief first poem does not resolve this conundrum, by expressing her query as an exclamation, she leaves no uncertainty that she must do so.
[i] The Brownings’ Correspondence, 26 vols. to date, ed. Philip Kelley, et al. (Winfield, KS, and Waco, TX: Wedgestone Press, 1984- ), vol. 25, p. 98; hereafter cited parenthetically as BC. For discussion of EBB’s views on the cosmopolitan education of her son and its relationship to her poetic practice, see Beverly Taylor, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Politics of Childhood,” Victorian Poetry 46 (2008): 405-27; and Christopher M. Keirstead, “‘He Shall Be a “Citizen of the World”’: Cosmopolitanism and the Education of Pen Browning,” Browning Society Notes 32 (2007): 74-82. EBB associated the concept “citizen” or “citizeness of the world” with both personal experience and international political concerns. In 1852 she wrote to her beloved distant kinsman and friend John Kenyon about her bitter estrangement from England, on the personal level fostered particularly by her father’s obdurate refusal to reconcile following her marriage, and on the political level, by England’s failure to support Italy’s independence: “I’m a citizeness of the world now, you see, and float loose” (BC 17: 70).
[ii] To avoid the confusion of using her maiden name (Elizabeth Barrett Barrett) and her married name, throughout the essay I refer to Elizabeth Barrett Browning by the initials she frequently used to sign her manuscripts and letters. Both she and Robert Browning expressed pleasure that her initials and characteristic signature would not change with their marriage (BC 11: 248-49).
[iii] Marjorie Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), pp. 27, 24-25. Yet even so magisterial a study as Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), while it ranges beyond the traditional canon to include many women and working-class writers, scarcely mentions EBB.
[iv] What were you thinking about at age six?
Britain’s practice of seizing sailors from merchant ships and forcing them to serve in the Royal Navy (“forcement” or “impressment”) constituted one cause the United States declared war on England in 1812, while England was still at war with France. The London Times discussed the problem of impressment. See, e.g., “Parliamentary Proceedings,” 26 June 1812; “American Papers,” 10 March 1812; as well as editorial comment calling impressment “the disgrace of England and of a civilized age” (“Upon Hearing Cuxhaven,” 3 October 1811). On naval impressment see Nicholas Rogers, The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and Its Opponents in Georgian Britain (London: Continuum, 2007), esp. pp. 134-38.
[v] First published in H. Buxton Forman’s edition of EBB’s Hitherto Unpublished Poems and Stories with an Inedited Autobiography, vol. 1 (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1914), p. 31; subsequently cited as HUP. Punctuation follows that of the manuscript copied into a notebook by EBB’s mother, in the Berg collection of the New York Public Library; see The Browning Collections: A Reconstruction with Other Memorabilia, compiled by Philip Kelley & Betty A. Coley (Winfield, KS: Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University, The Browning Institute, Mansel Publishing, Wedgestone Press, 1984), D666. All quotations from EBB’s works follow The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 5 vols., vol. eds. Sandra Donaldson, Rita Patteson, Marjorie Stone, and Beverly Taylor (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010); subsequently cited as WEBB. EBB’s juvenilia appear in vol. 5, this first poem on pp. 159-60. On this poem and other juvenilia, see Beverly Taylor, “Childhood Writings of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: ‘At four I first mounted Pegasus,’” The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, ed. Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 138-53
“I am making myself remember that awful time”: Juvenilia, Hiroshima, and the Politics of Peace
Get PDFIn 1951, Arata Osada, a professor of education at Hiroshima University, took on the grim task of collecting first-hand accounts from children who had survived the atomic bombing of August 6, 1945. Of the over 1000 testimonials he received, he compiled 105 into Genbaku no ko: Hiroshima no shonen to shojo no uttae [Children of the A-Bomb: The Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima], a book meant to honour the dead and make a bold contribution to peace education. This article argues that children’s writing about the atomic bombing was implicated in multiple, interrelated political projects. The first section examines the writers’ work of navigating the meaning of their survival, as well as Japan’s new pacifist identity; some of the children express ambivalence or even distrust toward this new national script. The second section picks up the more explicit politics that the children’s stories came to represent. The left-leaning Japan Teachers’ Union sponsored two films based on the book, but neither fully achieved the goal of communicating both the deplorable intensity of war and the spiritual imperative of peace to a broader audience. The third section dwells on the extent to which children fought to articulate their grief, and focuses on the unwilling writer, an unusual figure in juvenilia studies. The children were asked to sublimate their pain into the work of peace, but their writing testified instead to an experience that defied articulation altogether, and to a need for resolution that was ultimately beyond their ability or responsibility to deliver. Through Children of the A-Bomb, juvenilia studies can recognize children’s writing as a tool for political action, a site of traumatic memory, and also a fundamentally limited form of communication that could only know the surface of human pain, and leave readers wondering at the soundless depths below
Trauma in Phillis Wheatley’s Juvenilia
Get PDFReading Wheatley’s writings as juvenilia and considering her poetry and letters in relation to one another can productively complicate the view that her poetry is devoid of traumatic affect. This approach illuminates her agency in grappling with how to represent her traumatic childhood experiences. To hear trauma in Wheatley’s poetry requires recognition of her agency in representing her traumatic childhood experiences and their effects on her memory, attachment, and affect. This essay argues that the poems Wheatley published while under age twenty-one provide insight into the challenge of representing the traumatic separation from her mother when her physical and psychic survival depended on her affective relationship with her mistress Susanna Wheatley. What we can hear in Wheatley’s poetry about her childhood in Africa and her upbringing in the Wheatley household must be teased out of the performance of obedience and gratitude expected of her as an enslaved child.
White\u27s Wilbur and Whiteley\u27s Peter Paul Rubens
No full textMichael Sims’ book called The Story of Charlotte’s Web makes no mention of Opal Whiteley or her famous diary, published in 1920. Instead, Sims turns to the well-recognized connection between E.B. White\u27s Charlotte\u27s Web (1952) and his essay, "Death of a Pig," written some four years earlier. In the essay, White describes the loss of a pig whose life he had tried to save, and his description of the autobiographical origins of Charlotte\u27s Web strongly suggests that his earlier experience with a pig who had died of natural causes is what convinced him that he “needed a way to save a pig’s life.” This essay argues, nevertheless, for another intertext for Charlotte’s Web, namely the diary of Opal Whiteley (1920), a seven-year-old girl who loved and lost a pig called Peter Paul Rubens. 
Young England: Part One
No full text“Young England: Part One” pursues central questions for juvenilia studies: how did the turn-of-the-century juvenile tradition influence succeeding generations of Victorian writers, and what new questions does scholarly understanding of juvenile writing in Britain allow literary critics to ask now? The Romantic-era juvenile tradition gets reconstituted through its influence on the 1840s Tory splinter movement, Young England. I argue that this contradictory, conservative group of titled young writers paradoxically reveals how the marginalized juvenile tradition calls its writers into being—and asks us to revise our ideas of literary traditions and of history in general. The young Romantics Byron and Shelley symbolized youthful writing to Young Englanders, but so did another lesser-known juvenile writer, Percy Smythe, Sixth Lord Strangford. That Strangford was father to a prominent Young Englander: George Smythe, later Seventh Lord Strangford. In recovering both Strangfords’ literary juvenilia, Part One considers the rethinking of genealogy and succession within writing by young authors—arguing it underlies Young England as youth movement, especially its sense of history as ultimately inaccessible but vital nonetheless in its construction. Part Two (JJS 3.2, June 2020) will look more closely at how Young England’s shaping fantasy of history depends on youth. It focuses on the self-fashioning within its contradictions of one-time juvenile writer and Young England’s mentor, Benjamin Disraeli (later Prime Minister and Earl of Beaconsfield)—contradictions employing signifiers of youth that were generative of his virtuoso performance as writer, celebrity, and statesman
The Romanticism of Elizabeth Barrett\u27s Juvenile Poetics
No full textThis article traces enthusiastic language and tropes across the juvenilia of Elizabeth Barrett (later Browning) in order to establish her investment in the concept during her teens and early twenties. Barrett’s early autobiographical essays praise and emulate Romantic strong feeling, but they also address the conflated—and sometimes conflicted—forms of enthusiasm at the root of this tradition. After analyzing "My Own Character" (1818) and "Glimpses of My Life and Literary Character" (1820), the article reads Barrett’s first major volume of poetry, An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems (1826), as a logical extension of the principles found in these juvenile memoirs. As these texts show, Barrett\u27s early poetics valued enthusiasm as necessary for writing poetry, and for establishing poetic identity