portrayal of childhood

‘Trailing clouds of glorydo we come/ From God who is our home.’ What is new about the Romantic portrayal of childhood?
1
Something I read many years ago regarding children being miniature adults
has always stayed with me. The statement was alluding to the clothes worn by
children in the society of medieval and the Middle Ages up to Georgian times yet that
was not the only way in which they were considered miniature adults. Whilst history
tells us that people of those times did not have a great deal of understanding about
the nurturing needs of children and how different they are to adults, as well as the
dreadful harm that can be done to a child’s nature when mistreated; and coupling
that with the erroneous understanding of ‘original sin’, as was bandied about by
hard-line church-goers, there was little room for gentleness.
Looking through our history books we also know that until the 'age of enlightenment'
also known as the 'age of reason', there were no two ways about it: - we are a
created race – humankind, and there is one God Creator, who visited earth as
Jesus. Unfortunately it would have been those ‘hard-liners’ that would have helped
put Christianity out of favour by those who saw the harm that could be done and
wanted to challenge the old ways.
Although being put out of favour by 'new' thinkers did not change anything except
that those wanting change started their move away from Biblical truths1
, to the
'scientific' theories that began to take over, setting the 'stage' for Darwinian ideas to
come about in the next century.
The intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment regarded themselves as a
courageous elite who would lead the world into progress from a long
period of doubtful tradition and ecclesiastical tyranny2
With ‘Enlightenment’ there came an empirical, physical focus, and the ‘one
truth: intellectual’3
taking over in the literary world. With that zeitgeist 'pendulum'
swinging, as it continues to do all through history, we see the reaction to this
enlightenment in the literary themes of the Age of Sensibility and then Romanticism.
This was a time where, by reading the poets during those oncoming ages, their
prose became more tuned in to thoughts and feelings, they began to focus more on
the inner man: this was the new model for the Romantic era, and for the two poets,
William Wordsworth and William Blake we see two men, both with a deep faith in
Biblical precepts and also having a great empathy with children.
1
Henry M. Morris, Ph.D., The Scientific Case Against Evolution, http://www.icr.org/home/resources/resources
_tracts_scientificcaseagainstevolution/, accessed 21 March 2015
2
www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Age_of_Enlightenment, 29 December 2012, accessed 16 March 2015
3
Enlightenment and Romanticism: a comparison, www4.ncsu.edu/~dsbeckma/222Enlitenmentcf.html,
accessed 16 March 2015

2
There always seems to be a synchronicity within society, which is why I use
the term zeitgeist, because not only was Wordsworth desirous to press his own
standpoint for a happier childhood, onto society, but previously a Genevan-born
Frenchman by the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau had also used his own
philosophising to this end. His upbringing appears to have been a very haphazard
affair and in turn when he fathered children himself, he did not have the ability of his
later convictions - laid out in his book Émile. Stephanie Metz, writing on the new
portrayal of childhood writes:
The Wordsworthian child most often acts as a child of nature. For
Wordsworth, Nature is both the best parent and the best possible teacher
for a child. Wordsworth's autobiographical Prelude, inspired by Rousseau's
Emile, focuses on the development of the poet largely through his
interaction with Nature beginning in childhood. There is little need for a
human instructor when a child can go out into Nature and be taught by
imagination and experience.
Childhood becomes a central stage of life for Wordsworth and for the
adults portrayed in his poems. In "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold" he
states "The Child is father of the Man."4
Here, finally, through literature, children were being noticed as entities in themselves,
not just miniature adults. Rousseau had gone past his dysfunctional earlier live(s)
and saw the need for helping a child to enjoy life, to get the most out of it, and to be
protected from destroying themselves by lack of the right kind of education. And
most importantly:
a view of children as very different to adults – as innocent, vulnerable,
slow to mature – and entitled to freedom and happiness (Darling 1994: 6). In
other words, children are naturally good.
~~~
‘Make the citizen good by training’, Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes, ‘and
everything else will follow’.
~~~
In Émile Rousseau drew on thinkers that had preceded him – for example,
John Locke on teaching – but he was able to pull together strands into a
coherent and comprehensive system – and by using the medium of the novel
he was able to dramatize his ideas and reach a very wide audience. He made,
it can be argued, the first comprehensive attempt to describe a system of
education according to what he saw as ‘nature’ (Stewart and McCann
1967:28)
5
4
Stephanie Metz, Wordsworth and the Child of Nature, http://web.utk.edu/~gerard/romanticpolitics/
wordsworth-and-the-child.html, accessed 17 March 2015
5
YMCA George Williams College.,http://infed.org/mobi/jean-jacques-rousseau-on-nature-wholeness-and-
education , accessed 16 March 2015

3
John Clarke has written about the emerging new attitudes to children
“between the seventeenth century and the present day”, and lays it out succinctly in
this excerpt:
There are mechanisms for the proper upbringing of children and their key
function is education. In some cases this version of the family was derived from
religious faith. The Puritan family in England or the American colonies was seen as
an institution based on ensuring the salvation of family members by proper
education in the rules of good behaviour and the importance of faith. This
responsibility was seen as resting primarily with the father, who was seen as the
head of the household in religious as well as economic terms. The need was to
‘school’ the child in correct behaviour using appropriate punishments (including
regular beatings) to enforce discipline. Children were seen as inherently sinful and
in need of guidance. At the extreme they were compared to wild animals whose
spirit needed to be broken in order that they might develop the humility and
obedience which would lead them to be good Christians (Ozment 1983). Not all
families followed this extreme model, even in Protestant communities. Simon
Schama describes seventeenth-century (Protestant) Holland as a society ‘besotted
with the children’, where the idea of children and their pastimes played a major
part in family life and in art (Schama 1987: 495).
6
Looking more carefully into this era we can assess where the new viewpoint
of childhood would take place. Wordsworth may well have had a happy childhood
himself, certainly not the repressed brutality described in the passage above, by
misguided church-people. Perhaps his country wanderings contain his true happy
memories. It is also apparent that he was a person profoundly in touch with himself
and the world around him. Throughout history there had been many harsh and cruel
things in the lives of people and their children, particularly within cities and towns;
before industrialisation when the main work was at home:
“Houses are likewise scattered an infinite Number of Cottages or
small Dwellings, in which dwell the Workmen which are employed, the Women
and Children of whom, are always busy Carding, Spinning and so that no hands
being unemployed, all can gain their Bread, even from the youngest to the
ancient; hardly anything above four Years old, but its hands are sufficient to
itself."
7
Therefore, it is not hard to understand that with Wordsworth’s own pastorally happy
childhood, he would use his talent to bring to others his joy in nature and the re-
creating of childhood, such as the one he had experienced. It became apparent that
he wanted to immortalise an ideal for children, more along the lines of his own life,
and with the Romantic era coming along with him in it, Wordsworth was able to paint
6
John Clarke, Histories of Childhood, www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/bpl_images/content_
store/sample_chapter/0631233962/wyse%2002chap01.pdf, accessed 16 March 2015
7
(Daniel Defoe), www.powerinthelandscape.co.uk/education, Power in the Landscape 2007, accessed 16
March 2015

4
pictures with words of his kind of childhood; this not only for every child, but for his
readers to re-create in their own imaginations, an idyll from before their adult lives
took over:
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:--
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
From Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood (Immortality Ode) - A bucolic word-picture of happy families of children
picking flowers in an unspoiled and picturesque meadow or wood.
Romanticism or/and Realism is a good point of discussion. What is simply 'romantic'
ideas for some are 'real' for others. Those who have not known the happy ‘real’ need
to experience it in the poems of someone who knew how to touch people's hearts
with their own tranquil view of life. That reality of an Afterlife, is one of the main
points of Wordsworth's optimism in his poetry, so that when we read
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy
We understand that the Biblical view of children is, not only that they each have an
angel who speaks on their behalf before God8
- which is the part about ‘heaven lies
about us in our infancy’ - but that, as with all of us, the soul (or spirit) comes from
God and goes back to God.9
Horrible things, like the 'prison-house' come into the
lives of children, but God is our Home and when they turn their hope and
expectations to God, they can look forward to a better life – perhaps here on earth,
but most definitely at 'home with God': which we understand to be ‘heaven’.
As with Rousseau, who did not appear to be a church-goer or believer, Wordsworth
also was for education, but his idea of education was through didactic poetry, he
wanted always, to have a message and a purpose for the good of those reading it.
8
Matthew 18:10, New Living Translation - "Beware that you don't look down on any of these little ones. For I
tell you that in heaven their angels are always in the presence of my heavenly Father”.
9
Ecclesiastes 12:7, New Living Translation -‘For then the dust will return to the earth, and the spirit will return
to God who gave it.’

5
For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: … For our
continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are
indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; …, that the understanding of
the Reader must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections
strengthened and purified.
10
Wordsworth was a believer, and in this excerpt from great-poets-and-their-
theology, we can read of the powerful effect Wordsworth's poetry had on a person
prone to depression.
I wish to compare with this a passage from John Stuart Mill. The
philosopher and economist, in a time of great mental depression, sought relief
in the reading of poetry. He read Byron, but he found his own ennui and
discontent only reflected to him. He turned to Wordsworth. There he found
medicine for his state of mind, because Wordsworth's poems furnished the
culture of the emotions which he was in quest of. They awakened not only the
love of rural beauty but a greatly increased interest in the common destiny of
human beings.
"The result was," said Mr. Mill, "that I gradually, but completely, emerged from
my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it I long continued to
value Wordsworth, less according to his intrinsic merits, than by the measure
of what he had done for me. Compared with the greatest poets, he may be
said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and
contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which require
poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is much more fitted to give,
than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he."
11
But still, another person might decide that realism has to include the horrors of
the time: starvings, beatings, exploitation. The people committing such outrages in
the Romantic era were of the same mentality as those who have always lived
brutishly; such behaviour went on from the beginning of time and will go on till the
end; some are taught to change their ways, others never learn.
William Blake was also a Bible-believing poet of the Romantic era; yet he
came to his art from a remarkable visionary angle. Given to visions himself and living
in a family where his talents and traits were accepted and encouraged, he coupled
his beliefs with his art, and his visions with his imagination. So that in his wonderful
depictions of the spiritual - as he believed was happening all around us - for example
his picture of Adam and Eve portraying Satan hovering over themi
10
William Wordsworth, Wordsworth's Preface to lyrical ballads, Westport, Conn : Greenwood Press 1979,22-23
11
Great Poets and their Theology, www.biblestudytools.com/classics/strong-great-poets-and-their-
theology/wordsworth.html, accessed 16 March 2015

6
He also had that understanding that the innocence which is natural and born in a
child, like a raw material, is so easily corrupted by the crookedness, hurt and
dishonesty of the life they will move into.
Hence his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. He had a terrific affinity
with the concept of 'childhood' and saw each child as 'a divine image', yet he also
understood that mankind is made in God's image and we can all have the
accessibility to God's nature; therewith combining a certain amount of that Biblical
understanding in his poetry:
The Divine Image (Innocence)
To Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love
Is God, our Father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love
Is man, His child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.
He saw the innocence of unspoiled childhood as a divine medium, but that for most
people the experience of life will change the person. From the Songs of Experience:
TO TIRZAH
Whate’er is born of mortal birth
Must be consumèd with the earth,
To rise from generation free:
Then what have I to do with thee?
The sexes sprung from shame and
pride,
Blowed in the morn, in evening died;
But mercy changed death into sleep;
The sexes rose to work and weep.
Thou, mother of my mortal part,
With cruelty didst mould my heart,
And with false self-deceiving tears
Didst blind my nostrils, eyes, and
ears,
Didst close my tongue in senseless
clay,
And me to mortal life betray.
The death of Jesus set me free:
Then what have I to do with thee?
We can see that Blake acknowledges that mankind has to put up with some very
unhappy life events, but the last two lines of this poem take us back to his own
theology - 'set free':- why should he worry [about death] 'then what have I to do with
thee?' To the committed Christian death, as an end of the physical body12
, is not
terrifying.
Both Blake and Wordsworth had, and still have their critics, but their different
approaches to childhood and the 'home that is God', emanates through, in both of
12
Matthew 10:28 (KJ21) And fear not them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear
Him that is able to destroy both soul and body in hell

7
their writings, and also in Blake’s drawings. In an era when life expectantly was not
what it is today, particularly for children, we can see the comforting imagery in his
picture of the family meeting again at the gates of heaven.ii
Happily, the misunderstanding [by many] of such far-reaching poets/artists does not
curb our present day access to their amazing literary and artistic genius; and in
Wordsworth’s preface to The Prelude he almost argues for acceptance of his
particular kind of poetry:
Several of my Friends are anxious for the success of these Poems from a
belief, that, if the views with which they were composed were indeed
realized, a class of Poetry would be produced, well adapted to interest
mankind permanently, and not unimportant in the multiplicity, and in the
quality of its moral relations: and on this account they have advised me to
prefix a systematic defence of the theory, upon which the poems were
written. But I was unwilling to undertake the task, because I knew that on
this occasion the Reader would look coldly upon my arguments, since I
might be suspected of having been principally influenced by the selfish and
foolish hope of reasoning him into an approbation of these particular
Poems: and I was still more unwilling to undertake the task, because,
adequately to display my opinions, and fully to enforce my arguments,
would require a space wholly disproportionate to the nature of a preface13
He was obviously not unaware of his critics – people like Byron:
“Letters from Lord Byron hit out at fellow writer William 'Turdsworth'”14
As well as another fellow poet Anna Seward:
Clearly, the young poet's "simplicities" were already a well-known irritant.
Equally clearly, "Daffodils" distilled them to an infuriating degree. "Surely,"
Anna Seward fulminated in a letter to Walter Scott, "if his worst foe had
chosen to caricature this egotistic manufacturer of metaphysic importance
upon trivial themes, he could not have done it more effectively!"
15
He carried on regardless and in the ‘Sonnet’, he lets some feelings show, seemingly
aligning himself with the way Shakespeare ‘unlocked his heart’, along with other
writers, who made themselves vulnerable by opening themselves to scorn by the
words they wrote: Petrarch, Spenser, Dante, Milton. Wordsworth understood that a
writer will write from his heart, but not all people can accept it in the innocence of
those intentions.
Sonnet
BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
13
Op.cit.,, 19
14
/www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/6238447/Letters-from-Lord-Byron-hit-out-at-fellow-writer-
William-Turdsworth.html, 28 Sep 2009, accessed 17 March, 2015
15
Andrew Motion, The Host with the Most, www.theguardian.com/books/2004/mar/06/andrewmotion.
featuresreviews, 4 March 2006, accessed 17 March 2015

8
Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound;
With it Camöens soothed an exile's grief;
The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned
His visionary brow: a glow-worm lamp,
It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land
To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew
Soul-animating strains—alas, too few!
Wordsworth almost seemed to long for Milton in his sonnet ‘To Milton’. Here was
another poet who wrote Godly words, and he appears to be lamenting the loss of a
Godly man with whom he would like to fellowship. Just reading the first two lines
seems to show us this emotion.
To Milton London, 1802
BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
William Blake, in particular, was not appreciated in his time. Such radical spiritual
artistry was not for everyone. He was a person who did not change for those around
him, but actually withdrew from society and from offering up his works for what he
would see as scorn, extremely sad for such talent to be unacknowledged16
. Yet
maybe it was that lack of public acclaim that kept his focus on what he was meant to
be doing for posterity, demonstrated by his own quote: “I am under the direction of
messengers from heaven daily and nightly.”17
16
Philip Pullman, www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/28/philip-pullman-william-blake-and-me, 28
November 2014, accessed 26 April 2015
17
William Blake Biography, www.biography.com/people/william-blake-9214491, accessed 17 March 2015

9
Jean-Jacques Rousseau did not have the same optimism of faith as
Wordsworth and Blake, Chapter 1 of his classic work on political theory The Social
Contract (published in 1762) begins famously, ‘Man was born free, and he is
everywhere in chains’. It is an expression of his belief that we are corrupted by
society.
Accepting the premise of Wordsworth and Blake that children are particularly
cherished by God, then finishing with a quote from Émile is as good as any:
Everything is good as it comes from the Author of Nature; but everything
degenerates in the hands of man
Émile
Word count 3,748

10
i
Adam and Eve, Blake's Pencil Drawings. Second Series, Nonesuch Press, 1956
i
Ibid., ‘The Meeting of A Family in Heaven’

11
BIBLIOGRAPY
Blake's Pencil Drawings. Second Series, Nonesuch Press, 1956
Untermeyer, Louis, edited by, The Albatross Book of Living Verse, London: Collins, first published
1933
Wordsworth, William, Wordsworth's Preface to lyrical ballads, Westport, Conn : Greenwood Press
1979
Bright, Bill, www.heritageofthefoundingfathers.com
Enlightenment and Romanticism: a comparison, www4.ncsu.edu/~dsbeckma/222Enlitenmentcf.html
Great Poets and their Theology, www.biblestudytools.com/classics/strong-great-poets-and-their-
theology/wordsworth.html
Kate Shellnutt, http://blog.chron.com/believeitornot/2010/11/thanksgiving-blessings-half-of-
americans-say-grace-half-skip-it/, November 24, 2010,
Metz, Stephanie, Wordsworth and the Child of Nature, http://web.utk.edu/~gerard/romanticpolitics
/wordsworth-and-the-child.html
Morris, Henry M., Ph.D., The Scientific Case Against Evolution, www.icr.org/home/resources
/resources _tracts_scientificcaseagainstevolution,
Motion, Andrew ,The Host with the Most, www.theguardian.com/books/2004/mar/06/andrew
motion.featuresreviews, 4 March 2006
www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/history/uk_1.shtml, 2011-04-27
www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/national-championship-game-auburn-players-kneeling-
in-news-photo/466966103, Florida State at Rose Bowl Stadium. Pasadena, CA 1/6/2014
www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Age_of_Enlightenment, 29 December 2012
William Blake Biography, www.biography.com/people/william-blake-9214491
www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/6238447/Letters-from-Lord-Byron-hit-out-at-fellow-
writer-William-Turdsworth.html, 28 Sep 2009
YMCA George Williams College,.infed.org/mobi/jean-jacques-rousseau-on-nature-wholeness-and-
education ,
www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Age_of_Enlightenment, 29 December 2012
www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/28/philip-pullman-william-blake-and-me, 28 November
2014

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