“Many cunning tricks, and a great deal of noise”
The Guardian has an article about an art exhibition in Bath featuring paintings of children, including paintings by Jane Austen’s contemporaries, Gainsborough and Hogarth. Who can write about 18th century children without mentioning Jane Austen’s work?
A trip to Bath is itself a journey to the 18th century. It’s hard, looking at the beautifully austere architecture of the Georgian spa town where Jane Austen took the waters, to believe this was a child-centred culture. Yet Rousseau’s cult of the primitive was fundamental to the revival of this ancient Roman city in the 18th century. The doric grandeur is meant to evoke Stonehenge, the primal energy barely contained by the straight lines of classical design. This says it all about the 18th century - on elegant stages and in elaborate costumes basic urges were deliberately indulged. At Bath, the cool interiors of the Assembly Rooms were a perfect setting for sex. And Jane Austen for one saw this as infantilist, a gratification of folly by flirts who lacked adult common sense.
It is in Bath that Catherine Morland, in Northanger Abbey, reads the overgrown fairy tales of fashionable Gothic novels, when she should be starting to see the world through adult eyes. The fashion for horror stories in the 18th century was a form of infantilism - part of a culture that also discovered fairytales and published almost all the great nursery rhymes - Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book in 1744, Mother Goose’s Melody in 1765.
