‘Fy Charles’ said my father. ‘Hector is dead, Sir,’ said I, and I did not stay to hear any further.”
Elizabeth Sandham, who wrote somewhat later “for the Children of former Schoolfellows”, claimed a wider influence for the story of school life. “A school”, she says, “may be styled the world in miniature. There the passions which actuate the man may be seen on a smaller scale.”
On this assumption, she ventured into the unknown microcosm of a boys’ school,[106] where even Miss Edgeworth came to grief; but her book was a model for some hundreds of school stories in which ambitious, studious or mischievous boys play impossible parts. She was more at home in a later study of schoolgirls[107]: careful sketches, brightened by satirical remarks; but the moral is too obvious. Miss Sandham’s sense of humour was too slight for effective relief.
An admirable miscellany, which brings genuine adventure and comedy into the school setting, is The Academy; r, a Picture of Youth,[108] published in 1808 by a Scottish schoolmaster who, in his preface, claims to have taught “all ranks, from the peer’s son to the children of the lower orders.” His taste is hardly less catholic than his experience, for he not only adds satirical and dramatic scenes to the old fables and admonitions, but adapts Berquin to an English atmosphere, and is ready to sympathise with the shepherd, the labourer, the old man and his horse. The book is a medley of old manners and new sentiments, in which the characters, although they stand for familiar types, earn some rights of personality by individual acts and speeches.
This author is indebted to Smollett for a trick of making his characters talk in the language of their callings. Young Tradewell’s father consigns him to the Rector’s care “per the bearer,” as if he were a bale of merchandise; and a nautical father advises a son who has “gone a little out of his course” to “sail clear of faults”, but if at any time he is driven into them, to “be a brave boy and steer honourably off.”
Satire in Children’s books is apt to miss its mark. Some parents who bought this Picture of Youth must have felt like the old gentleman of the story, who was furious at a clever caricature of himself until somebody assured him that it was intended for his neighbour. Restored to good humour by similar means, they would doubtless enjoy these burlesques: the foolish indulgent mother, the sporting squire who laughs at his son’s escapades, the parents who teach their boy “to recite passages with tragic effect from our best poets”.
The Rector’s rational methods recall Sandford and Merton; but the book is for older lads. The Bad Boy of The Academy is more like a hero of Picaresque romance, and the Good Boy (the son of a naval officer, destined for the Service) is a new figure in moral tales; a pupil “highly acceptable to the Rector” for his own sake; the more so, perhaps, for the fresh memory of Trafalgar.
English people have an inherent power of reconciling opposites, which perhaps comes of their being a mixed race. The most revolutionary writers were held back by some thread of ancient custom, and those who clung to the older modes of thought were not without some broadening influence. “Nature” and “Truth” were still the accepted ideals of literature, although the meaning of both had changed; and The Juvenile Spectator,[109] which applied Addison’s method of character-drawing to the nursery, used it with a new understanding of childhood.
Mrs. Arabella Argus,[110] its author, adds piquancy to her general scheme by introducing herself as a Grandmother. Doubtless she was old enough to remember Lilliputian traditions; but she was also too young to forget the newer counsels of sanity and freedom. Like Addison, she begins by describing herself and her aims, but so far is she from admiring the model of the Baby Spectator, that she directs her brightest satire against “little prodigies” and child-philosophers.
She is “an old woman, but not an old witch nor yet a fairy”; and without resorting to anything so irrational as magic, she is able to set forth secret information upon “Nursery Anecdotes, Parlour Foibles, Garden Mischief and Hyde Park Romps”.