Wordsworth's Prescient Baby: Conceptions of the Mother-Infant Relationship in the Development of the Self (1790s-1890s)

The 1870s: Children of Science and Evolution

The Prelude was published in 1850, but by the late 1850s Romantic notions of the subjective self had been occluded by advances in scientific theory more concerned with objective study, most importantly Darwinian evolutionary thought. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) was hugely influential, both in the realms of scientific debate and in Victorian society at large. Evolutionary biology became the primary way of understanding the development of homo-sapiens, their history and their genetic relationship to the natural world.

With Darwin’s influence and the rise of empirical psychology in the 1860s, the mind of the child became an object for professional scientific and psychological study. 93 By the 1870s, the Child-Study movement, a middle-class professional grouping, called for the widespread observation and scientific study of children. The observation of children and infants through diaries was inspired by Darwin and later championed by eminent psychologists such as James Sully and FH Champneys.94 These diaries95 became a specific scientific literature for the observation of early skills acquisition, particularly the acquisition of language.96 Importantly authors wrote up their observations with publication in mind or at least to inform scientific debate. For example, Sully’s diary was the basis for his Studies of Childhood (1895).97

Darwin’s own baby diary began in 1839, observing in close detail the development of his first child William Erasmus. Darwin was interested in showing that the physiological expression of emotions in humans was no different from those shown in animals. The observations he made culminated in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, (1872) and ‘A biographical sketch of an infant’ published in Mind in 1877, where he paid much attention to the way in which his children demonstrated pleasurable feelings. With William at ‘Six weeks old & 3 days’, he recorded that his wife ‘Emma saw him smile- not only with her lips, but eyes,- Thinks he directed his eyes towards her face & after looking at her attentively, smiled- Anne smiled about the same time. Henrietta smiled at 3 weeks.’98 Taking a major conceptual step, the diary shows the notion of developmental phases.99 Gaskell’s diary and other domestic diaries of earlier periods had no concept of demarcated stages. In 1877 Darwin specified the most important developmental stage as the first three years of life. ‘In these early years’ he wrote, ‘the brain is capable of receiving impressions, which, although retained unconsciously, the memory of them having totally disappeared, will be automatically rendered active.’100 Here, Darwin provides scientific respectability for the development of the self in early infancy even though he was mainly concerned with stages of primitive mental mechanisms, rather than the foundations for adult subjectivity.

The Romantics unlike Darwin were with the constitution of the subjective self and the imagination. In The Prelude Wordsworth is dealing with the infant’s subjectivity and concomitant intersubjectivity. Sully, an important member of the Child Study movement admired Wordsworth’s valuation of the individual soul, but wrote in 1895 that the Child Study movement was interested in ‘the opening germ of intelligence from the colder point of view of science.’101 Therefore a focus on the biological basis of emotional development gave a different though very important angle on infant development. There occurred a shift in emphasis away from mother-infant interaction and its developmental implications, to theories of genetic inheritance (ideas which were later manipulated by the eugenics movement). We also find this in the recurring preoccupation in the scientific diaries of Darwin and Sully as to whether or not a given behaviour is instinctive/’natural’ or learned.102 In other words, the nature versus nurture debate.

The extent of the influence of evolutionary theory on views of the maternal role are to be found in the child care advice of the period. If Darwin could be parodied as reducing humans to merely advanced apes, then the child could be seen as a primitive in need of civilising. Henry Ashby wrote in Health in the Nursery (1898), ‘the child is destitute of any sort of conscience…Ages of civilisation have not succeeded in eradicating some of the most characteristic and unpleasant impulses of the brute.’103 Before it was the mother’s role to tame the soul, now it was the inner beast. Once again a belief that carers were required to civilise their children meant much was required from parenthood. ‘The discipline of love’ would no longer cut it in the cultivation of the right kind of child. Samuel Smile’s Character (1871) argued that ‘Mere instinctive love is not sufficient. Instinct, which preserves the lower creatures, needs no training; but human intelligence, which is in constant request in a family, needs to be educated.’104 Such opinions demonstrate a clear move from Wordsworth, Lewis/Martin and Sara Coleridge’s Romantic sensibility. Although a few writers of the 1830s and 40s such as Thomas Bull and JSC Abbott preached about the negative influences of maternal care, they reiterated the recurring theme of over-indulgent parenting. Whereas by the late nineteenth century, the majority of writers, such as Smiles and Marion Harland in her Common Sense in the Nursery (1886) felt a mother’s love would have little effect on the successful outcome of her progeny. Significantly, the mother as primary breast feeder was no longer desired. Instead the use of a Nurse was encouraged, and writers like Isabella Beeton argued that artificial food was as beneficial as breast milk.105

Following their findings on inheritance, Darwin and his followers like William Thierry Preyer rejected notions of tabula rasa.106 Preyer, an influential British physiologist working in Germany in the 1870s concluded from observations of his infant son to deduce that ‘The mind of the newborn child…does not resemble a tabula rasa upon which the senses first write their impressions’. 107 Instead ‘the tablet is already written upon before birth, with many illegible…marks, the traces of the imprint of countless sensuous impressions of long-gone generations.’ 108

Conclusion: The Vicissitudes of Ideas and Brilliant Exceptions

During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, three general trends in the understanding of the mother-infant relationship emerge. Before the 1830s, maternal attention was generally considered to be important to the development of the infant, but her importance did not go far beyond ensuring the physical well-being of her offspring. By the 1830s, advances in science as well as increasing evangelisation demanded the mother play a greater role in the spiritual and moral development of her children. Increasing importance was placed on the influence of the mother and her moral probity in shaping the child’s character. By the 1870s, with Darwin’s theory of evolution and the formalised scientific study of infancy, understandings of the development of the infant focused on the biological and evolutionary rather than the internal and subjective. As we have seen these are general trends in the written culture and may not take into account the ideas and practices that may have prevailed in middle and working class communities. I recognise my sources are limited to those of the leisured and motivated literate classes, but a huge section of the population were not blessed with the time to record observations and may not have had the resources or motivation to do so.

However, it is evident that Wordsworth was most ahead of his time and remains an outstanding exception. Wordsworth, unlike his contemporaries or predecessors explicitly expressed the importance of the connection between mother and infant as the basis for the development of the mind and the subjective self. We can see that only by the 1830s was this relationship acknowledged as formative by a wider public, and in a more limited sense. Attachment theorists like Bowlby in the mid-twentieth century along with Klein and developmental psychologists have established Wordsworth’s wider implications as generally accepted truths. They also concur with Wordsworth on the detrimental effects of maternal deprivation. Recognising the importance of the mother’s love and care for the infant, Wordsworth’s goes further in explaining how the mother’s love enables the infant to develop. His notion that the ‘discipline of love’ is vital for the healthy evolution of the intellect and imagination is now accepted with few dissenters. Wordsworth showed particular prescience in his intuitive understanding of the infant’s intersubjectivity and capacity to create a dynamic internal world from the healthy attachment to his mother, through processes of projection and introjection.

The idea of inspiring cognitive and emotional development rather than teaching it behaviourally is still a hotly debated topic today. Whether there is a need for regulated feeding, sleeping and crying regimes continues to polarise parents and theorists. Recently journalist Anna Karpf has written that since the 1940s ‘Disciplinarian advice has alternated with liberal advice: for every Gina Ford advocating controlled crying, there has been a liberal antidote- Dr Spock or Penelope Leach’.109 We have seen that this fault line extends back well before the 1940s, and will probably continue to dominate debate in the foreseeable future.

Author James Fotheringham wrote in 1899 that is ‘in good part owing to him [Wordsworth], that we have studied the child-nature so much, so carefully, as we have lately been doing.’110 Today this claim still rings true, a testament to the poet’s genius not only in the field of literature but in the theory of self and mind.

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References

Manuscript Sources

Cheshire Record Office, DSA 75, Catherine Stanley of Alderley, ‘Journal of Her Four Children’, (1812).

Coleridge Papers, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Sara Coleridge, ‘Diary of Her Children’s Early Years’, (1830-1838).

Keele University Special Collection and Archives, Keele, W/M 1116, Wedgwood Manuscripts, Josiah Wedgwood II, ‘Hints on the Management of the Children’, (1797-9).

Primary Sources

Abbott, John S.C, The Mother at Home, (London 1830).

Cadogan, William, Essay on the Nursing and Management of Children, (John Knapton, London 1748).

Coleridge, Sara, Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge, eds. Edith Coleridge (HS King London 1873).

Combe, Andrew, Treatise on the Physiological and Moral Management of Infancy, (Maclachlan, Edinburgh 1840).

Darwin, Charles, ‘A Biographical Sketch of an Infant’, Mind, vol 7, (1877) pp.285-294.

Darwin, Charles, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 4 1847-1850, eds. Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith, (Cambridge 1988).

Downman, Hugh, Infancy or the management of children: a didactic poem in six books, 6th ed. (Exeter: Treman and Son 1803).

Gaskell, Elizabeth ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ (1852), Gothic Short Stories, eds. David Blair, (Wordsworth Classics 2002).

Gaskell, Elizabeth, My Diary, (printed privately, London 1923).

Hartley, David, Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind: On The Principles of Association Ideas, (AMS Press 1973).

Hartley, David,Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations. In two parts, 2 vols, (London 1749).

Karpf, Anna, (2013) ‘Mothers on the naughty step’, The Guardian, 20 April, p.5.

Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude: A Study of Unconscious Forces, (New York Basic Books 1957).

Lewis, Sarah and Aimé Martin, Woman’s Mission, (London 1839).

Locke, John,An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, (London 1690).

Necker de Saussure, Mme., Progressive Education or, Considerations on the course of life (Volume 1), (London 1939).

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emilius; or, an essay on education, (London 1763)

Smiles, Samuel, Character, (The Pioneer Press 1871).

Stern, Daniel, The interpersonal world of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology, (Karnac Books 1998).

Stickney Ellis, Sarah, The Mothers of England: Their Influence and Responsibility, (London 1843).

Sully, James, Studies of Childhood, D Appleton and Company, (New York 1896).

Trench, Melesina, Thoughts of a Parent on Education, (John W. Parker, London 1837).

Wollstonecraft, Mary, Thoughts on the education of daughters, with reflections on female conduct in the more importance duties of life, (London 1787).

Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, eds.R. L. Brett,A. R. Jones, (Routledge 1991).

Wordsworth, William, The Major Works, eds. Stephen Gill, (Oxford 1984).

Wordsworth, William, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850: authoritative texts, context and reception, recent critical essays, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, Stephen Gill, (New York 1979).

Secondary Sources

Allen, Richard, ‘David Hartley’,The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(Summer 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta(ed.), <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2012/entries/hartley/> (December 2012).

Beatty, Arthur, William Wordsworth: His Doctrine and Art in their historical relations, (University of Wisconsin 1922).

Bott Spillius, Elizabeth and Jane Milton and others, The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, (Routledge 2011).

Britton, Ron, Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis, (Psychology Press 1998).

Chapple, J.A.V, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters, (Manchester University Press 1950).

Chapple, J.A.V and Anita Wilson, The Diaries of Elizabeth Gaskell and Sophia Holland, (Keele University Press 1996).

Coe, Richard N, When the Grass was Taller, (Yale 1984).

Coveney, Peter, The Image of Childhood, (Penguin 1957).

Gianoutsos, Jamie, ‘Locke and Rousseau: Early Childhood Education’, The Pulse, Vol 4. No 1, (Baylor University 2004) pp.1-23.

Goodman, Russell, ‘Transcendentalism’,The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(Spring 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta(ed.), <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/transcendentalism/> (December 2012).

Hardyment, Christina, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Lock to Gina Ford, (Frances Lincoln Publishing 1983).

Humphreys, Jere T, ‘The Child-Study Movement and Public School Music Education’,

Journal of Research in Music Education,Summervol. 33(1985) pp. 279-86.

Mechling, Jay, ‘Advice to Historians on Advice to Mothers’, Journal of Social History, 9, (Oxford 1975) pp.44-63.

Pollock, Linda A, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child relations from 1500 to 1900, (Cambridge University Press 1983).

Seigel, Jerrold, The Idea of the Self, (Cambridge 2005).

Shuttleworth, Sally, The Mind of the Child, (Oxford 2010).

Side, Jeffrey, Wordsworth’s Empiricist Poetic and its Influence in the Twentieth Century, PHD Dissertation, (Leeds September 2006).

Steedman, Carolyn, The Tidy House, (Virago Press 1987).

Wallace, Doris, Margery Franklin & Robert Keegan, ‘The Observing Eye: A Century of Baby Diaries’, Human Development, eds. A.L. Dean, 37-1-94, (January 1994) pp.1-29.

Wordsworth, Jonathan, William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision, (Oxford 1982).

Background Reading

Balfour Stevenson, Margaret Isabella, Stevenson's Baby Book: Being the Record of the Sayings and Doings of Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson, Son of Thomas Stevenson and Margaret Isa, (London 1922).

Bowlby, John, Attachment and Loss Vol 1, (Pimlico 1997).

Buckingham, H.W& Stanley Finger, ‘David Hartley’s psychobiological associationism and the legacy of Aristotle’,Journal of the History of the Neurosciences,6, (1997) pp.21-37.

Easterlin, Nancy, ‘Psychoanalysis and “The Discipline of Love” ’, Philosophy and Literature, Volume 24, No.2, (October 2000) pp.261-279.

Hayden, John, ‘Wordsworth, Hartley, and the Revisionists, Studies in Philology’, Vol. 81, No. 1, (University of North Carolina Press 1984) pp. 94-118.

Hunt, David, Parents and Children in History: The Psychology of Family Life in Early Modern France, (Basic Books, New York 1970).

Klein, Melanie ‘On observing the behaviour of young infants’, (1952) The Writings of Melanie Klein, vol. III, eds Money-Kyrle, Jospeh, and others (London Hogarth Press 1975).

Klein, Melanie, ‘Some theoretical conclusions regarding the emotional life of the infant’ (1952)The Writings of Melanie Klein, vol. III, eds. Money-Kyrle, Joseph and others, (London Hogarth Press 1975).

Milton, Jane and Caroline Polmear and Julia Fabricius, A Short Introduction to Psychoanalysis, (Sage Publications 2004).

Steedman, Carolyn, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority 1780-1930, (Virago 1995).

Winnicott, Donald, ‘Mirror-Role of Mother and Family in Child Development’, (1967) Playing and Reality, (Tavistock Publications 1971).

Woodman, Ross, Sanity, Madness, Transformation; The Psyche in Romanticism, (Toronto 2005).

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Endnotes

1.) The term ‘infant’ is taken here to mean the age before talking. The word infant comes from ‘infans’ which means speechlessness. Typically the period between 0 and 12 months old.

2.) For more baby diarists from the rest of Europe and the United States in this period, see Doris Wallace, Margery Franklin & Robert Keegan, ‘The Observing Eye: A Century of Baby Diaries’, Human Development, eds. A.L. Dean, 37, (January 1994), p.1-94. For information on child care advice writers from the USA in 1830, see Christina Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, Frances Lincoln Publishing, (1983) p.92-94.

Hardyment also points out that American childcare advice books were much less widely read in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century which is why I have chosen not to look at them.

3.) Jeffrey Side, Wordsworth’s Empiricist Poetic and its Influence in the Twentieth Century, PHD Dissertation, Leeds (September 2006), p.63.

4.) Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood, Penguin (1957), p.39.

5.) Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self, Cambridge, (2005), p.88.

6.) Arthur Beatty, William Wordsworth: His Doctrine and Art in their historical relations, University of Wisconsin, (1922) p.103.

7.) William Wordsworth, Two-Part Prelude, (1799), Book II line 131 cited in Ron Britton, Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis, Psychology Press (1998), p.134

8.) Britton, Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis, p.134.

9.) Britton, Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis, p.137.

10.) Britton, Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis, p.137.

11.) David Hartley,Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations. In two parts, 2 vols, James Leake and others, London, (1749) p.368 cited in Russell Goodman, ‘Transcendentalism’,The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(Spring 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta(ed.),<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/transcendentalism/> (December 2012), p.102.

12.) Britton, Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis, p.134.

13.) Britton, Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis, p.134.

14.) Britton, Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis, p.137.

15.) See also: Colwyn Trevarthen ‘Descriptive analyses of infant communication behaviour’ in H.R. Shaffer (ed.), Studies in mother-infant interaction: The Lockh Lomond Symposium, pp. 221-270, London (1977)

16.) John Bowlby, Child Care and the Growth of Love (1953) cited in Christina Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, Frances Lincoln Publishing, (1983) p.236.

17.) William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850: authoritative texts, context and reception, recent critical essays, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, Stephen Gill, New York, (1979), p.164.

18.) William Wordsworth and Sameul Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, eds.R. L. Brett,A. R. Jones, Routledge, (1991) p.83.

19.) Stern, The interpersonal world of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology, p.241.

20.) Jonathan Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision, Oxford, (1982), p.78.

21.) Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision, p.78.

22.) Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.18.

23.) Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.18.

24.) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius; or an essay on education, p.17.

25.) Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the education of daughters, with reflections on female conduct in the more importance duties of life, London (1787), p.4.

26.) Hugh Downman, Infancy or the management of children: a didactic poem in six books, 6th ed. Exeter: Treman and Son, (1803) p.1.

27.) Downman, Infancy or the management of children: a didactic poem in six books, p.3.

28.) Downman, Infancy or the management of children: a didactic poem in six books, p.7.

29.) George Armstrong, Account of the Diseases most Incident to Children, London (1767), p.1 cited in Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.13.

30.) Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.4.

31.) Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.11.

32.) Keele University Special Collection and Archives, Keele, W/M 1116, Wedgwood Manuscripts, Josiah Wedgwood II, ‘Hints on the Management of the Children’, (1797-9) p.12.

33.) Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.4.

34.) Thomas Reid, Works, (ed.) G.N. Wright (4 vols.), Edinburgh, 1843 cited in, Cheshire Record Office, DSA 75, Catherine Stanley of Alderley, ‘Journal of Her Four Children’, (1812), p.1.

35.) Catherine Stanley of Alderley, ‘Journal of Her Four Children’, p1.

36.) Catherine Stanley of Alderley, ‘Journal of Her Four Children’, p.17.

37.) Catherine Stanley of Alderley, ‘Journal of Her Four Children’, p.79.

38.) Catherine Stanley of Alderley, ‘Journal of Her Four Children’, p.52.

39.) Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child relations from 1500 to 1900, p.120.

40.) Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.18.

41.) Catherine Stanley of Alderley, ‘Journal of Her Four Children’, p.27.

42.) Josiah Wedgwood II, ‘Hints on the Management of the Children’, p.1.

43.) Josiah Wedgwood II, ‘Hints on the Management of the Children’, 1797-9 p.1.

44.) Josiah Wedgwood II, ‘Hints on the Management of the Children’, 1797-9 p.1.

45.) Josiah Wedgwood II, ‘Hints on the Management of the Children’, 1797-9 p.19.

46.) Josiah Wedgwood II, ‘Hints on the Management of the Children’, 1797-9 p.1.

47.) Cheshire Record Office, DSA 75, Catherine Stanley of Alderley, ‘Journal of Her Four Children’, (1812), p.5.

48.) For more British childcare advice books that focused on the physical and practical rearing of infants/children see: Thomas Bull, Hints to Mothers (1837), Isaac Taylor, Home Education (1838), Pye Henry Chavasse, Advice to Mothers (1839), Samuel Smiles, Physical education, or the nurture and management of children (1838), William Cobbett, Advice to Young men …on how to be a Father (1829), Louisa Mary Barwell, Nursery Government (1836) Note the greater number of male writers concerned with practical and physical matters.

49.) Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.36.

50.) Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.36.

51.) Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.19.

52.) William Cadogan, Essay on the Nursing and Management of Children, John Knapton, London (1748) cited in Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.19.

53.) Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.36.

54.) John S.C Abbott, The Mother at Home, London (1830) p.39.

55.) Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child, p.222.

56.) Mme Necker de Saussure, Progressive Education or, Considerations on the course of life (Volume 1), London (1939), p.67.

57.) Melesina Trench, Thoughts of a Parent on Education, John W. Parker, London, (1837), p.12.

58.) J.A.V. Chapple, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters, Manchester University Press, (1950), p.65.

59.) Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Mothers of England: Their Influence and Responsibility, London (1843), p.53.

60.) Stickney Ellis, The Mothers of England: Their Influence and Responsibility, p.53.

61.) Elizabeth Gaskell, My Diary, printed privately, London (1923), p.5.

62.) Gaskell, My Diary, p.16.

63.) Gaskell, My Diary, p.6.

64.) Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ (1852), Gothic Short Stories, eds. David Blair, Wordsworth Classics (2002), p.105.

65.) Abbott, The Mother at Home, p.37.

66.) Abbott, The Mother at Home, p.14.

67.) Andrew Combe, Treatise on the Physiological and Moral Management of Infancy, Maclachlan, Edinburgh, (1840), p.35.

68.) Necker de Saussure, Progressive Education or, Considerations on the course of life (Volume 1), p.144.

69.) John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, (1690), p.51 cited in Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.16.

70.) Abbott, The Mother at Home, p.27.

71.) Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.44.

72.) Sarah Lewis and Aimé Martin, Woman’s Mission, London (1839), p.28.

73.) Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education cited in Jamie Gianoutsos, ‘Locke and Rousseau: Early Childhood Education’, The Pulse, Vol 4. No 1 Baylor University (2004), p.2.

74.) Seigel, The Idea of the Self, p.100.

75.) Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, (1690) cited in Gianoutsos, ‘Locke and Rousseau: Early Childhood Education’, p.4.

76.) Rousseau’s ideas on this matter are quite contradictory. Before the child is learning to walk and talk, he is nothing ‘more than what he was in the womb of his mother: he had no sentiments, no ideas, he scarcely had sensations; he could not even feel his own existence.’ Whereas later on in Book One, ‘at the beginning of life…his sense experiences are the raw material of thought’.

77.) Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude: A Study of Unconscious Forces, New York Basic Books, (1957), p.180.

78.) Elizabeth Bott Spillius, Jane Milton and others, The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, Routledge (2011), p.63.

79.) Richard Coe, When the Grass was Taller, Yale, (1984), p.257.

80.) Lewis and Martin, Woman’s Mission, p.28.

81.) Necker de Saussure, Progressive Education or, Considerations on the course of life (Volume 1), p.79.

82.) Stickney Ellis, The Mothers of England: Their Influence and Responsibility, p.14.

83.) Sara Coleridge, Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge, eds. Edith Coleridge, London, (1873), p.57.

84.) Coleridge, Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge, p.57.

85.) Although The Prelude was not published until after Wordsworth’s death in 1850, we cannot say for sure that William Wordsworth and his ties with the Coleridge family did not inspire some of Sara’s thinking. However in the letters she seems to come to these conclusions by herself, and furthermore expressed a somewhat serendipitous surprise at The Prelude’s ‘delightful’ content when she read it in 1850.

86.) Coleridge, Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge, p.215.

87.) Coleridge, Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge, p.215.

88.) Coleridge, Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge, p.305.

89.) Chapple and Wilson, The Diaries of Elizabeth Gaskell and Sophia Holland, p.76.

90.) Chapple and Wilson, The Diaries of Elizabeth Gaskell and Sophia Holland, p.89.

91.) Chapple and Wilson, The Diaries of Elizabeth Gaskell and Sophia Holland, p.89.

92.) Kurt Koffka, Die Grundlagen der psychischen Entwicklung, (1925) p.31-32 cited in Wallace, Franklin & Keegan, ‘The Observing Eye: A Century of Baby Diaries’, p.1.

93.) Jere T Humphreys, ‘The Child-Study Movement and Public School Music Education’, Journal of Research in Music Education, Summer vol 33, (1985) p.79.

94.) Wallace, Franklin & Keegan, ‘The Observing Eye: A Century of Baby Diaries’, p.14.

95.) For more information on baby diaries focussed on language development, see the bibliography of Carolyn Steedman’s, The Tidy House, Virago Press, (1982), p.230.

96.) Wallace, Franklin & Keegan, ‘The Observing Eye: A Century of Baby Diaries’, p.23.

97.) James Sully, Studies of Childhood, New York (1896) p.399.

98.) Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 4 1847-1850, p.412.

99.) Wallace, Franklin & Keegan, ‘The Observing Eye: A Century of Baby Diaries’, p.24.

100.) Charles Darwin, ‘Biographical Sketch of an Infant’, Mind, no.7, (1877) cited in Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.150.

101.) James Sully cited in Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.98.

102.) Wallace, Franklin & Keegan, ‘The Observing Eye: A Century of Baby Diaries’, p.23.

103.) Henry Ashby, Health in the Nursery (1898) cited in Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.92.

104.) Samuel Smiles, Character, (1871), p.69 cited in Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.92.

105.) Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, p.94.

106.) Wallace, Franklin & Keegan, ‘The Observing Eye: A Century of Baby Diaries’, p.16.

107.) William Thierry Preyer, The Soul of the Child: observations on themental developmentof man in the first years of life, (1988) cited in Wallace, Franklin & Keegan, ‘The Observing Eye: A Century of Baby Diaries’, p.15.

108.) William Thierry Preyer, The Soul of the Child: observations on themental developmentof man in the first years of life, (1988) cited in Wallace, Franklin & Keegan, ‘The Observing Eye: A Century of Baby Diaries’, p.15.

109.) Anna Karpf, (2013) ‘Mothers on the naughty step’, The Guardian, 20 April, p.5.

110.) James Fotheringham, Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’ as a study of Education, London (1899) cited in Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood, p.68.

111.) William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850: Authoritative texts, context and reception, recent critical essays, (eds.) Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, Stephen Gill, New York (1979), p.20-21.

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Appendix 1: The Two-Part Prelude of 1799 111

Blessed the infant babe-
For with my best conjectures I would trace
The progress of our being- blest the Babe
Nursed in his Mother's arms, the Babe who sleeps    ln. 270
Upon his mother's breast, who when his soul
Claims manifest kindred with anearthlysoul,
Doth gather passion from his mother's eye!
Such feelings pass into his torpid life
Like an awakening breeze, and hence his mind,    ln. 275
Even in the first trial of its powers,
Is prompt and watchful, eager to combine
In one appearance all the elements
And parts of the same object, elsedetached
And loath to coalesce. Thus day by day    ln. 280
Subjected to the discipline of love,
His organs and recipient faculties
Are quickened, are more vigorous; his mind spreads,
Tenacious of the forms which itreceives.
In one beloved presence- nay, and more,    ln. 285
In that most apprehensive habitude
And those sensations which have been derived
From this beloved presence- there exists
A virtue which irradiates and exalts
All objects through all intercourse of sense.    ln. 290
No outcast he, bewildered and depressed:
Along his infant veins are interfused
The gravitation and the filial bond
Of Nature that connect him with the world.
Emphatically such a being lives,    ln. 295
An inmate of thisactiveuniverse.
From nature largely hereceives, nor so
Is satisfied, but largely gives again;
For feeling has to him imparted strength,
And- powerful in all sentiments of grief,    ln. 300
Of exultation, fear and joy- his mind,
Even as an agent of the one great mind,
Creates, creator andreceiverboth,
Working but in alliance with the works
Which it beholds. Such, verily, is the first    ln. 305
Poetic spirit of our human life-
By uniform control of after years
In most abated and suppressed, in some
Through every change of growth or of decay
Preeminent till death.    ln. 310