Victorian literature was remarkably concerned with the idea of childhood, but to a large degree we must understand the Victorian concept of childhood and youth as being, in some way, a revisionary response to the early nineteenth century Romantic conception. Here we must, to a certain degree, accept Harold Bloom's thesis that Victorian poetry represents a revisionary response to the revolutionary aesthetic of Romanticism, and particularly that of Wordsworth. The simplest way to summarize the Wordsworthian child is to recall that well-known line from a short lyric (which would be appended as epigraph to later printings of Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality, from Recollections of Early Childhood") -- "the child is father of the man." Here, self-definition in adulthood, and indeed the poetic vocation, are founded in the perceived imaginative freedom of childhood.
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life! (Wordsworth, "Ode")
To a certain degree, Wordsworth was introducing a new subject for poetry here, and offering a new place of origin for the poetic voice. Yet Victorian poetry in some way represents a reaction against the potentially liberatory Wordsworthian version of childhood. It is remarkable to discover that Matthew Arnold singled out the Wordsworthian vision of childhood as one of the chief flaws of his work:
Even the "intimations" of the famous Ode, those cornerstones of the supposed philosophic system of Wordsworth -- the idea of the high instincts and affections coming out in childhood, testifying of a divine home recently left, and fading away as our life proceeds -- this idea, of undeniable beauty as a play of fancy, has itself not the character of poetic truth of the best kind; it has no real solidity. The instinct of delight in Nature and her beauty had no doubt extraordinary strength in Wordsworth himself as a child. But to say that universally this instinct is mighty in childhood, and tends to die away afterwards, is to say what is extremely doubtful. In many people, perhaps with the majority of educated persons, the love of nature is nearly imperceptible at ten years old, but strong and operative at thirty. ("Wordsworth" 16)
Arnold's claim that the Romantic vision of childhood in Wordsworth's poetry "has no real solidity" is, in itself, a good indication of the overall revisionary strategy of Victorian poetry. Through a close reading of poems by Matthew Arnold and A.E. Housman, I hope to demonstrate that the Victorian ethic insisted upon real-world or concrete applications of the Wordsworthian mythos of childhood. The way whereby the Victorians revise the Romantic conception of childhood is twofold: the first is by subsuming childhood within a more general category of "youth" (which, in an era when adolescence arguably did not yet exist as a separate category, problematizes the concept of childhood altogether), and the second is by considering childhood as a subject problematized largely by its relationship to the question of education.
Matthew Arnold, as a poet, was deeply influenced by Wordsworth -- as a critic, his essay in praise of Wordsworth's poetry ranks Wordsworth in importance with Shakespeare and Milton. At the same time, Arnold came of age at a time when Wordsworth -- who had laid out the template for a new conception of childhood both as a subject of poetry and as a means of self-definition -- had aged into a monolith of Victorian tedium, the Queen's poet laureate was bewailed by Arnold's contemporary Robert Browning as a "lost leader." Arnold would therefore already stand in a problematized relationship to Wordsworthian ideas of childhood: it is difficult to assert that "the child is father to the man" when the man has become (like Wordsworth) a reactionary publishing sonnets in favor of the death penalty. To some extent the Romantic view of youth promulgated in Wordsworth's most influential work had already been subverted by the younger Romantics -- Byron and Shelley in particular -- who were unsparing in their
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