The Philosopher's Pen Part Two
In Charles Dickens’ Hard Times the narrator tells us that,
“No little Grandgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who worried the cat who killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb: it had never heard of those celebrities and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.”
Dickens’ novel is a satirical attack on the hard-line utilitarian, rationalist approach to the education of children (epitomised by the character Thomas Gradgrind) which privileged fact-based knowledge and saw all forms of fantasy or fiction, and specifically the fairy tale, as morally dangerous. By the time Dickens wrote his novel in 1854, the debate about the best way to raise and educate children had been going on for almost two hundred years.
The roots of the argument lay in the cultural turn that spanned the period from the end of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century; a shift that altered the way children and childhood were viewed in Western culture. There were three main influences on this turn: the Enlightenment, Protestantism and Romanticism. Enlightenment philosophy emphasised such values as reason and progress and saw children’s minds as blank sheets to be shaped by education and the environment. Protestantism viewed children as “important ideological vessels” who, through rigorous religious instruction, could be indoctrinated away from sin and the old Catholic beliefs. Romanticism revered childhood innocence and saw children as unsullied creatures of nature who, “trailing clouds of glory,” were closer to God.
Some, like rationalist philosopher John Locke, felt that children should be steered away from homespun fantasy and encouraged to read classical texts such as Aesop’s Fables. Puritans simply viewed the fairy tale as violent and amoral. Hallett and Karasek remind us that “the Rational Moralists and the Sunday School Moralists looked upon popular literature with a consternation verging on horror.” Others, however, like Dickens and the Romantic poet Coleridge, deplored this kind of utilitarian moralising and extolled the virtues of fantasy,
“Should children be permitted to read Romances and Relations of Giants and Magicians and Genii? – I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative – I know no other way of giving the mind a love of “the great” and “the Whole.”
The debate was to continue well into the twentieth century and, in many ways, still shapes our conceptions of childhood and children’s literature, including fairy tales, today. Modern day analysis of fairy tales is a wide and complex field, although a broad division can be made between historicist and psychoanalytical perspectives.