Juvenilia and the “Authentic Voice” of Children

by Isabella Ingram

“Early years of childhood form the basis of intelligence, personality, social behaviour, and capacity to learn and nurture oneself as an adult… Brain development is most rapid in the early years of life.” – UNICEF                                               

Children and childhood are often at the centre of scientific study today, from psychology to medicine. Now, in the twenty first century, it has been recognised as a stage of critical seminal development for human beings. It is strange, therefore, to consider how uninteresting a concept the idea of ‘childhood’ was merely two centuries ago, and the neglect children received in these fields as a result. Even stranger, perhaps, is the neglect of juvenilia today, despite our obsession with child psychology and development.

Juvenilia - literary works produced in an author’s youth – only began to receive significant attention in the twentieth century, after Australian scholar Christine Alexander published her work The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, and established the Juvenilia Press. It is still, however – as Alexander emphasises – “a non-canonical body of literature”, and one that is highly neglected. This lack of interest is surprising, considering the popularity of such works as Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre and Little Women, all of which were heavily influenced by the juvenilia that came before them.

In juvenilia we can find the roots of the adult novels to come – but that is not to suggest that they are predictable, inferior “trial runs” of an author’s mature works. More often than not, juvenilia surprises. Jane Austen, for example, wrote chaotic and violent parodies of the popular novels of her time, whilst the young Louisa May Alcott composed supernatural dramas in a Shakespearian style. Often, it is the disparities, rather than the similarities, between a writer’s juvenilia and their adult works that proves the most interesting, providing an insight, as Margaret Anne Doody suggests in her chapter of The Child Writer, into “the talents not fully expressed in the main oeuvre, or at least roads not taken”.

The demands of social custom on novelists were, in the eighteenth, nineteenth and – to an extent – twentieth centuries, highly restrictive on their literary freedom. Juvenilia allows us to see the extent to which authors were conscious of their audience, and willing to alter their work as a result. In The Child Writer, Alexander applies particular emphasis to the idea of “the authentic literary voice of the child” in contrast to the self-conscious expressions of the adult, and it is because of this contrast that juvenilia could be regarded as being truer to the character of its creator than their mature works. Since publication is not their ambition, children are free from having to comply with the demands of a readership and are thus able to present the world however they wish to. Juvenilia is “unconstrained”, argues Alexander, because it is not subject to “self-consciousness”, “social mores” or a “judgemental audience”. Instead, “we find in the manuscripts an audacity and humour that is often lacking in their adult productions”.

Moreover, child writings, for all their absurdity and sensationalism, often provide a unique insight into the realities of the world that their youthful creators inhabited. The worlds we see in juvenilia have to be a reflection of the real one, since imitation is central to a child’s thought process. As Alexander suggests, “early writings represent a microcosm of the adult world, disclosing the concerns, ideologies, and values of the age…They demonstrate the young author’s appropriation of a power they would not otherwise have in a world where children were frequently denied quite basic human rights, let alone a voice”.  A common factor that links most eighteenth and nineteenth century juvenilia is violence, confusion and senseless chaos. This surely reveals the perception children had of the intolerant adult world that wielded authority over them.

Writing juvenilia, therefore, is an empowering activity – particularly for the children of the nineteenth century. Perhaps this also serves to explain, furthermore, why this “non-canonical genre” is so dominated by women. Women – or rather girls –were prevented from receiving the same level of education as boys, and thus juvenilia provided an intellectual outlet. It is interesting that so many of these female child writers chose to assume male narrative voices in their juvenile fiction – Charlotte Brontë’s favourite personas were the Duke of Wellington and his two sons, Lord Charles Wellesley and the Duke of Zarmorna, whilst the young George Eliot follows the story of a deserting soldier, Edward Neville, during the English Civil War. Juvenilia allowed young girls to obtain an authority in their imaginative worlds denied to them in a way that adult fiction – if it was to be deemed acceptable for publication – never could.