A century of children's books

by Florence V. Barry

Only once he seems to have acted in what must have seemed to him an irrational way, and that was at the request of the lady (Miss Elizabeth Sneyd) whom at that time he hoped to make his wife. With his natural propensity to improve and educate, he had asked her, in preparation for their future life, to forgo many pleasant and harmless diversions which seemed to him useless or unreasonable. Miss Sneyd, with proper spirit, suggested that a French dancing-master might help Mr. Day to overcome certain faults of deportment which displeased her, and so nice was his sense of justice, that he actually crossed to France and spent some time in a hopeless experiment. Nobody could have taught Mr. Day to dance; perhaps the lady knew it. Such graces as he managed to acquire only provoked her to say that she liked him better as he was before, and he retired to console himself with philosophy.

His next venture promised better success. He resolved to educate two orphan girls upon Rousseau’s plan, so that, in time, one of them might fill the place he had intended for Miss Sneyd. But Nature again proved herself too strong for Philosophy. The children quarrelled, refused to be educated “in Reason’s plain and simple way”, and could not be cured of shrieking when their guardian frightened them to test their courage. As they grew up, he was forced to admit another failure; but he clung to his theories, and oddly enough lost nothing of his belief in the reasonableness of “female character”. A later pupil of his more than justified this confidence. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, although he had been Day’s successful rival in love, was still his friend, and used to send his little daughter Maria to spend her holidays with him. By that time Mr. Day had found a lady who could endure his ways, and was settled in Essex, busy with schemes for the benefit of his poor neighbours.

Maria Edgeworth, fresh from a conventional boarding school, was quick to appreciate his odd humours and philosophic mind. She obediently swallowed his doses of tar-water, submitted to the severest tests in exact reasoning, and under his influence, acquired that intense regard for truth which stamped all her later writings. Yet it was not through any theories derived from him or from her father that she became the greatest writer of Moral Tales, but through her own experience of life and character; and her work for children must be considered apart from her Rousseauist principles. Mr. Day, indeed, whose ideal of womanhood was in some ways little in advance of Rousseau’s, did his best to crush her first effort (the translation of Adèle et Théodore) by expostulating with her father for encouraging it; but Maria was too much his pupil to give way to a prejudice based solely on his horror of “female authorship”.

Mr. Day was fully alive to the want of good books for children; not only did he put his own talents at their service, by contributing to Mr. Edgeworth’s instructive serial Harry and Lucy,[88] but he found the task so interesting that it grew into an independent volume, three parts dissertation and experiment, and the fourth a fresh effort to express life in terms of theory.

Doubtless he found it a relief to work out in a book the experiments which he had found so disconcerting in practice: to show, as the result of his system, a super-Fool of Quality,—a farmer’s son, instead of a nobleman’s,—and to make his foil the spoilt child of rich parents. These are the two children, Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton, “introduced as the actors” to give interest and coherence to Mr. Day’s collection of lessons and stories.

When he says they are “made to speak and behave according to the order of Nature,” “Nature” must be understood to mean the “natural” result of Theory; for it is only the Bad Boy who, in his naughtiness, is a real child of Nature. The Good Boy of the Moralist is a stock figure of allegory, but the Bad Boy lives; a hundred models will serve for his portrait. He is the real hero of Sandford and Merton, as Satan is of Paradise Lost.

Thus, even in a book, human nature was too much for Mr. Day; and yet his Good Boy, Harry Sandford, is something more than the good half of the Fool of Quality. His virtues, although superhuman, are not unlike those of the youthful Thomas Day; but under the guidance of Mr. Barlow, that insufferable model of the Perfect Tutor, he exhibits the mature head of Mr. Day on young shoulders, and so becomes the mouthpiece of Rousseau, the lay-preacher of Mr. Barlow’s sermons, and the chief instrument of the Bad Boy’s reformation.

There is a note of English severity in Mr. Day’s reading of Rousseau. His notion of self-control is stricter than anything in the Emile: “Mr. Barlow says we must only eat when we are hungry and drink when we are dry”; he is utterly intolerant of wealth: “The rich do nothing and produce nothing, the poor everything that is really useful”. Mr. Barlow, Harry Sandford and the amiable Miss Simmons take it in turns to express Mr. Day’s opinions of the idle and frivolous pastimes of Society. Mr. Barlow was “an odd kind of man who never went to assemblies and played upon no kind of instrument,” he was “not fond of cards” and preferred relating moral histories. Harry Sandford found the theatre “full of nothing but cheating and dissimulation;” and when the youthful guests of Tommy’s house-party were preparing for a Ball, “Miss Simmons alone appeared to consider the approaching solemnity with perfect indifference”.

Much of this is autobiography. Under the figure of Miss Simmons’s uncle, Mr. Day, in fact, discloses himself: “a man of sense and benevolence, but a very great humorist”. It is his humour to look at the world as his poor boy looks at the rich man’s house:

“To the great surprise of everybody, he neither appeared pleased nor surprised at anything he saw.”