Jennifer Thorn

Eighteenth-century New England Congregationalism has often, and understandably, been related to the history of childhood in starkly negative terms, reflective of its steady emphasis on the eternal punishment that awaited the damned, young and old alike.  This chapter suggests that the effacement of all forms of social identity in the face of the imperative of striving to avoid damnation that is evident in the sermons of Jonathan Edwards and others could also mean that the hierarchical relationship of adult and child—mandated by the Fifth Commandment though it would seem to have been—mattered less than the distinction between those who are “in Christ” and “out of Christ.”  The life and writings of the biracial Congregational minister and one-time pauper Lemuel Haynes provides an important case of the unintended and short-lived consequences of the Puritan non-differentiation of childhood and adulthood for early New England’s theory and practice of racial differentiation and inclusion, revealing a kind of conceptual loophole in its understanding of social hierarchy that enabled Haynes’ rise to social prominence; his 1788 placement in the West Parish Congregational Church of Rutland, Vermont, made him the first black pastor of an all-white congregation in America.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British readers of quite various kinds of writing would have been hard put to avoid reading about child-murder. At one end of the spectrum, broadsheets and ballads told often lurid tales of women accused of child-murder; at the other, doctors and lawyers discussed in new journals the professional challenges they faced in relation to child-murder, such as the determination of whether a dead infant had been stillborn and whether an illegitimate pregnancy had been concealed. Somewhere in the middle, newspapers carried reports of the bodies of infants found in public parks and streets; the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, the Ordinary of Newgate's Account, and other media that focused on crime and punishment presented accounts of trials and executions for popular consumption; and reformers' pamphlets proposed solutions to, in Thomas Coram's words, the "daily sight of infant corpses thrown on the dust heaps of London."

Focusing on specific instances of the transformative effect of the circulation of narratives of child-murder, Writing British Infanticide takes as its purview not child-murder per se but the ways that writing about it credentialed and differentiated writers in different, but often overlapping, genres and moments in a key period in the expansion of print.

Writing British Infanticide demonstrates the ways that narratives of child-murder in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain reflect, and in certain ways elicit, complexity if not outright paradox: it was a capital crime for which most of those indicted received no punishment; a crime definitive of barbarity for which juries and many observing writers urged sympathy; a crime in which the consideration of alleged perpetrators' motivations repeatedly founders in an inability to understand the economic and affective as related. So doing, it argues both for the role of "writing British infanticide" in an emergent professionalism dependent upon print and for the special utility of a focus upon child-murder to the evaluation of the mutual constitution of gender and class.

This chapter in Disabling Domesticity, ed. Michael Rembis (Palgrave 2016) examines Mary L. Day’s memoir Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl (1859) both as evidence of the domestic happiness of blind people in the face of a prejudice-ridden society and as a case study in the mutual benefit to childhood studies and disability studies of the methodologies of each.  The chapter places Day’s memoir in the context of the rise of new ideas about the normative development of children, the maternal care that it allegedly required, and women’s charitable activism outside the home, ideas that made “childhood” achievable only by able-bodied, middle-class children, attendees of new public schools and consumers of a new children’s literature.  The prejudice that Day faced suggests the ways that the stigmatization of blind people in the nineteenth century was, in part, an effect of new civic and domestic ideals disseminated by writers based in the East; Day’s account of her life in the West, her serial adoption after her mother’s death by a series of neighbors, and her independence and wide travels by rail starkly belie the sentimental stories of tragic blind girls made omnipresent in the early nineteenth century by new children’s magazines and literature.

From the introduction to the collection Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century: Seduction and Sentiment (ed Toni Bowers and Tita Chico), in which this chapter appears: Thorn's chapter "considers representations of grief in Phillis Wheatley's child elegies.  She traces the poetic feints by which Wheatley's depictions of mourning functioned seductively to redefine traditional religious and familial hierarchies."

Relates the representation of race in the first English translation of Antoine Galland's Les mille et une Nuits--the anonymous Grub Street The Arabian Nights Entertainments (1708?-1717) and in Richard Burton's pseudo-anthropological Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments (1885-8) to changing models of authorial credibility related to the slow and uneven shift from the presumption of status as the basis of social order to class.

Nineteenth-century observers who saw Charles Brockden Brown's writing as inferior to and imitative of William Godwin's often framed that judgment in a discussion of their relative ages in the eras of their greatest productivity. An anonymous essay on Godwin in the Attic Miscellany of October 1824, for example, deemed Brown " a close and successful copy-ist of the English sage's style " and discerned " community of thought in their views, moral, religious, and political. " This " resemblance, " the anonymous critic opined, coincided with the " gigantic original[ity] " of Brown's writing, which was attributable to his youth, a state he defined implicitly as helpless in its lack of cultivation: " his imagination runs riot with him " where " Mr. Godwin has a command over himself in the manner of his recital which Brown has not been able to copy " (132). 2 Writing sixty years later in the Atlantic Monthly, Thomas Wentworth Higginson deploys a similar valorization of mature self-control in his backhanded celebration of Brown's unprecedented influence, as a colonial American writer, upon his British contemporaries: Brown was " the first to exert a positive influence, across the Atlantic, upon British literature, laying thus early a few modest strands toward an ocean-cable of thought " (57). 3 Even as Higginson's literary patriotism leads him to praise a colonial who commanded the attention of British writers, he is unable to regard that attention as merited by Brown's aesthetic achievement. The real inferiority of Brown's unpolished and wild novels to those by British