In Dorothy Kilner’s The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse (1783), Nimble watches as a little boy tortures his brother Brighteyes by using him as a plaything for the cat. Soon after, though, the little boy himself is similarly whipped by his father so that he will learn to feel the suffering of others and restrain 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 punishment such as this little boy’s but also indirect punishments such as illnesses, burnings and drownings; perhaps more surprisingly, patient, humble and God-fearing children, in order to establish their faith and virtue, also undergo great sufferings of body and spirit. Andrew O’Malley in his excellent book The Making of the Modern Child has successfully demonstrated how much of the discipline effected through late eighteenth-century children’s literature is Foucauldian in nature, 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 such as Kilner, Anna Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth and others emphasized the literary. It is sympathetic stories and the imaginative connections that they allow the reader to generate with society that are most effective in creating and controlling a self in these children’s texts; punishment and its ties to the body 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; the assault on the body is truly a failure of the pedagogical process for these women writers. Physical punishments rarely demonstrate a positive learning experience for the child within these texts; the efficacy of teaching through the body fails in comparison to teaching through the text. In demonstrating the failure of physical punishments to create a self that can sympathize, as in the boy with the mouse—who cannot sympathize with the position of the mouse and only releases him because he is being beaten—women writers of children’s literature at the end of the eighteenth century recreated the discourse of sensibility in a way that helped to divorce it from the body and tied it more firmly to the literary in a way that advocated for a “sympathetic self” in their child readers.