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Ann Wierda Rowland. Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. vii+305. $90.
Wordsworth's inventive adage on childhood-"The Child is Father of the Man"-has by now become a familiar topos. For Wordsworth, this figuration of the child as generative source represented the poet's idealized vision of a primitive, innocent, yet profound state of being. It is from this famous phrase that Ann Wierda Rowland initiates her recent study, Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture. Because Wordsworth's child embodies those qualities we associate with Romantic poetry-imagination, innocence, sentiment, spirituality, naturalism-Rowland sets out to uncover the rhetorical precedents that made Wordsworth's seemingly paradoxical articulation an epistemological possibility at the end of the eighteenth century. She aims to track the history of an idea: the Enlightenment search for origin stories that brought together a discourse of childhood and infancy with the history of history itself.
Wordsworth's ideological child was not produced in a vacuum. By tracing writings across the Scottish Enlightenment to Romantic-era antiquarianism, Rowland demonstrates how Wordsworth's notion was not only possible, but also inevitable. She begins with Wordsworth as well as with Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose parenthetical aside in Defence of Poetry established yet another important paradigm: "the savage is to ages what the child is to years." For Wordsworth and Shelley, as well as for eighteenthcentury thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, and others, the imagery of childhood (the infant, the savage) epitomized the foundations and beginnings of human culture. Through its analogical links to the savage, the infant formed the iconic roots out of which European nations sprouted.
Even though Wordsworth and Coleridge had enthusiastically experimented with child-like rustic and primitive diction in their Lyrical Ballads, by the time Romanticism's second generation rolled around, this seemingly rampant "infantilization" of literary culture was met with disparagement. Byron haughtily dismissed Wordsworth's "namby-pamby" versification, and newspapers complained frequently about the simplistic nursery-rhyme stylistics then becoming popular. The new vogue for naturalism and primitivism, Rowland surmises, threatened poetry's ethos as a masculinized form of high art. Taking these complaints of "infantilization" seriously, however, Rowland confronts such early nineteenth-century critiques in order to suggest that the fashion for the language of the nursery carried...