British Children's Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption 1850–1914 by Jane Suzanne Carroll (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: British Children's Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption 1850–1914 by Jane Suzanne Carroll Catherine Butler British Children's Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption 1850–1914. By Jane Suzanne Carroll. (Perspectives on Children's Literature) London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2022. xi+ 189 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–350–20178–1. British Children's Literature and Material Culture is an invaluable exploration of an aspect of children's literature that is often overlooked, even though (or perhaps because) it lies in plain sight. That aspect is the world of material objects by which the characters of that literature are surrounded and with which they are in constant interaction: furniture, tools, clothes, and so on, both handcrafted and [End Page 616] mass-produced. The material world has numerous aspects, the distinctions between which are often undefined: from physical objects subject to no laws but those of physics, to manufactured goods bearing the stamp of human labour and intent, to commodities owned and exchanged for money or social currency. This is the complex territory that Jane Suzanne Carroll sets out to map. The book begins with the Great Exhibition of 1851, an event apparently planned without reference to the possibility of child visitors. The lack of official materials precipitated a flurry of books attempting to educate children about the objects and to advise them on the best way to appreciate and interact with the various displays—mentally and emotionally, if not physically. The Exhibition was a new kind of experience for adults, too, and the quasi-religious hush of the crowds that trailed daily through the Crystal Palace (itself a name evoking fairy tale) witnessed to a general uncertainty about the proper relationship to be taken to manufactured goods. 'It-narratives', in which inanimate objects tell their story from manufacture to dissolution (or some portion thereof), arguably have a history at least as old as the Exeter Book riddles, but Carroll's focus in her second chapter is on nineteenth-century examples for children, which often combined factual information (for example, about processes of manufacture) and moral content (such as object lessons in fortitude or valuing one's possessions)—narrative functions not always in harmony. This is a fascinating account of a neglected literature and does much to illuminate the material surroundings of nineteenth-century homes of all classes, as well as the nature and immense scale of manufacturing in British factories and workshops. (However, the clearly erroneous claim of Asa Briggs that by 1900 '500 million tons of pins were being made weekly in Britain' (p. 65)—which amounts to fifteen tons of British-made pins annually for every human being on the planet—should probably not have been repeated without comment.) In an especially intriguing chapter, Carroll draws parallels between the nineteenth-century popularity of table-turning spiritualism, commodity fetishism, and the animated or speaking artefacts to be found in children's fantasies such as Mrs Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock (1877). While such artefacts were not quite an innovation (think of the speaking mirror in 'Snow White'), they certainly proliferated in this period, spurred in part by their appearance in Lewis Carroll's Alice books, which do indeed show some spiritualist influence. The potential of such objects to escape human control and, tsukumogami-like, become independent or even hostile to their owners is explored in Carroll's final substantive chapter. It must have been tempting to use a phrase such as 'from the Great Exhibition to the Great War' as this book's subtitle, but Carroll shows that, while the Great Exhibition was indeed the harbinger of a new age of consumerism, disenchantment with such displays had set in before the Great War had a chance to render them impracticable, as evidenced by the failure owing to lack of interest of the 1914 Universal Exhibition in Nottingham. That year did not mark the end of the consumer [End Page 617] age, of course, but Carroll's book elegantly charts an extended period of cultural adjustment that ran its course over the span of a human lifetime. Catherine Butler Cardiff University Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association