Abstract
In the twenty-first century, there is burgeoning interest in Jane Austen and children. The last decade has seen increasing production of Austen’s fiction for children including various board books for young readers and the Awesomely Austen: Illustrated and Retold series currently being released. In the last four-year period, at least three Austen biographies were published for children. In 2010, Austen critic and scholar, David Selwyn produced a book-length study aptly titled Jane Austen and Children. Overall, Selwyn’s book makes use of the “new” historicist methodology using Austen’s work as an entry point in which to explore various socio-cultural aspects of childhood during her period. His work is thoroughly researched and provides an illuminating and comprehensive view of many facets of childhood during Austen’s time but unfortunately focuses mostly on texts other than Austen’s. Still, it seems that critic and consumer alike see Austen and children as intimately connected. This is a provocative trend as the majority of critics agree with Christopher Ricks when he wrote that Jane Austen “disliked babies and didn’t blankly like children” (90). Those critics focus intently on the Austen children who, like the meddlesome Middleton children in Sense and Sensibility, disrupt all tranquility and behave, to borrow Selwyn’s phrase, like “brute beasts.” This study focuses on a small subset of Austenian children who, unlike their loud, disobedient cousins, are relatively well behaved, are rarely allowed intelligible speech, and slip in virtually unnoticed by the casual reader. Austen writes these children in terms of or alongside allusions to eighteenth-century pictorial arts. By observing how Austen’s “picturesque children” function in her fiction, readers can better understand Austen’s suppressed Romantic reverence toward the concept of childhood and adds critical evidence to the argument that Austen was indeed engaged with the Romantic movement.