In Dorothy Kilner’s The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1783), Nimble watches as his brother Brighteyes is made the cat’s plaything by a cruel little boy. Soon after, though, the little boy is whipped himself by his father so that he will properly appreciate and regret the suffering that he caused the mouse and learn to restrain exercising his power over the weak. Such scenes of physical violence abound in eighteenth-century children’s texts: idle, dishonest, and disobedient children experience not only direct physical punishments like this beating but also indirect punishments such as illnesses, burnings and drownings; even patient, humble and God-fearing children, in order to prove their faith and virtue, undergo great sufferings of body and spirit. Andrew O’Malley, in his excellent book The Making of the Modern Child, has successfully demonstrated the Foucauldian nature of much of the discipline effected through late eighteenth-century children’s literature, but what I would like to highlight in this paper is the role that the body plays in these texts and the ways in which women writers in particular emphasized the failure of physical discipline in the construction of the self.

Women writers for children at the end of the eighteenth century challenged not only Lockean and Rousseauean pedagogy but also the conceptions of the self offered by these philosophers; they turned toward the discourse of sensibility and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments to offer their child readers a sense of self that was based on social connections and Christian benevolence. But unlike conceptions of sensibility that relied on the body to communicate sympathetic feelings, such as those outlined by John Mullan and G. J. Barker-Benfield, women writers for children such as the Kilner sisters, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth and others emphasized the literary. For these writers, it is sympathetic stories that allow the ideal child reader to generate imaginative connections with society and it is narrative which is most effective in creating and controlling the self; physical punishments, on the other hand, limit and contain the self. If a child has failed to learn sympathy from a tale or from the imaginative process, then the instructor must retreat to the physical—for women writers the assault on the body is truly a failure of the pedagogical process. As Mitzi Myers has argued, women writers for children, as teachers and moral instructors, were not on the side of the “natural,” they were on the side of the “cultural,” in this case the literary. In demonstrating the failure of physical punishment to create a self that can sympathize (in the case of the boy who tortured the mouse, we learn that he releases Brighteyes not because he learns sympathy but because as he is being beaten he can longer hold onto the animal), women writers of children’s literature at the end of the eighteenth century reinvented the discourse of sensibility in a way that helped to divorce it from the body and tied it more firmly to the literary so that their ideal child readers developed a “sympathetic self.”