The Child: Non-precocity in Autobiography

This chapter asks why language acquisition is so central to autobiography of childhood experience and to scientific Child Study. I first argue that in their autobiographical works, Frances Hodgson Burnett and E. Nesbit define the child by her lack (rather than by her precocious anticipation) of attributes characterised as ‘adult’ and most particularly by her lack of language. In Burnett’s and Nesbit’s autobiographies, as in Wordsworth’s, the adult is therefore both the end and the apex of the child’s development. The same pattern—development as progress—is substantiated with the same evidence—the attainment of language—in Child Study and, most tellingly, in studies of the evolution of the human species in the late nineteenth century. Language acquisition is pivotal in Victorian autobiography and Child Study because it is, paradoxically, through language that adults can recover the pure (because pre-linguistic) insights of childhood; by both recovering and articulating these insights, adults also demonstrate their progress beyond childhood. Thus, in autobiographies even by leading innovators in the burgeoning genre of ‘children’s literature’ and in scientific writing by pioneers in the emergent discipline ‘Child Study’, we can see the pattern of pre-Darwinian developmental models—the pattern of progress—endure.