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Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World 1853
Nov. 25th, 2014 08:27 pmI was just reading a review of a biography of Lewis Carol which talked about how we moderns misinterpret his interest in little girls as paedophilia, and I wondered if I was harsh in thinking that Susan Warner’s *The Wide, Wide World* (1853) is weird in the way Ellen is groomed to be John’s wife from the age of ten. Was I misinterpreting this text, viewing it in terms of 21st century preoccupations.
But no. Here are her contemporaries writing about how disturbing they found the relationship depicted in this wildly popular novel.
Elizabeth Sewell, 1865. 'So.. half the children in England would be permitted to read such books as The Wide, Wide World... in which fascinatingly simple little girls of ten or twelve are petted and caressed by respectable gentlemen of five-and-twenty or thirty, who afterwards take the form of lovers, and marry them.... They are ... likely to do injury to a child's mind.'
Charlotte Yonge, 1869. The novels ‘have the very grave and really injurious effect of teaching little girls to expect a lover in any one who is good natured to them. Nothing ought to be more rigidly avoided, for it fills the child with foolish expectations and dreams, which poison her simplicity of mind and her present enjoyment.’
It’s not just me. (I feel better now I know I am not alone in being disturbed by a text which virtually no one else has read for 100 years.)
But no. Here are her contemporaries writing about how disturbing they found the relationship depicted in this wildly popular novel.
Elizabeth Sewell, 1865. 'So.. half the children in England would be permitted to read such books as The Wide, Wide World... in which fascinatingly simple little girls of ten or twelve are petted and caressed by respectable gentlemen of five-and-twenty or thirty, who afterwards take the form of lovers, and marry them.... They are ... likely to do injury to a child's mind.'
Charlotte Yonge, 1869. The novels ‘have the very grave and really injurious effect of teaching little girls to expect a lover in any one who is good natured to them. Nothing ought to be more rigidly avoided, for it fills the child with foolish expectations and dreams, which poison her simplicity of mind and her present enjoyment.’
It’s not just me. (I feel better now I know I am not alone in being disturbed by a text which virtually no one else has read for 100 years.)
