Book Review: Revolutions at Home

Bruce, Emily C. Revolutions at Home: The Origin of Modern Childhood and the German Middle Class. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021. 247 pp. ISBN (paperback): 978-1-62534-562-2.

Amanda M. Brian, Coastal Carolina University

Banner photo by Calvin Hanson on Unsplash

As debates regarding book bans in public libraries and schools rage in the United States, parents, teachers, librarians, politicians, and pundits would benefit from reading Emily Bruce’s Revolutions at Home: The Origin of Modern Childhood and the German Middle Class. Bruce recovers successfully children’s agency in their reading and education. The actively engaged child reader emerged from Enlightenment educational philosophies and middle-class familial practices, particularly as they were developed in German-speaking central Europe. Bruce teases out the tension between children exercising such agency and adult disciplining of knowledge and self-knowledge. This same tension is playing out in contemporary book-banning arguments, and understanding its roots as laid out so carefully in Revolutions at Home is helpful for contextualizing the stakes to grownups.

Bruce maps the creation of new male and female child readers in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. In doing so, she buttresses scholarly claims of the importance, and even centrality, of the German cultural matrix for northern transatlantic notions of modern childhood. This well-researched book, then, complements and expands upon such tomes in the history and study of German childhood as her doctoral advisor, Mary Jo Maynes’s, Schooling for the People: Comparative Local Studies of Schooling History in France and Germany, 1750–1850 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985) and Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers’ Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), as well as Ann Taylor Allen’s The Transatlantic Kindergarten: Education and Women’s Movements in Germany and the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) and Patricia Anne Simpson’s The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020). Her argument is transcendental: “I argue that the active child reader who emerged at this time was not simply a consequence of expanding literacy but was, in fact, a key participant in defining modern life” (3). She certainly demonstrates that children practiced increasing self-exploration and, therefore, increasingly shaped their own education over the course of the age of revolutions. Recovering children’s agency is notoriously difficult, as traditional archives and methodologies have failed to capture or acknowledge such child-led activities. Her contribution, then, to recovering children’s own experiences and practices is monumental, as she expands the history of reading and, really, media literacy.

Revolutions at Home includes five chapters—each tackling a different literary genre—and a helpful introduction and succinct conclusion. Chapter One, “Reading Serially: The New Enlightenment Youth Periodical for the New Youth Subject,” examines sixty serial publications for children published between 1756 and 1855. These publications represented new commercial work and literary laboratories as they sought to entice middle-class girls and boys to approach willingly their Enlightenment education. Pedagogical debates shone through these periodicals, and while they were predominantly prescriptive, they allowed and even encouraged interactive and emotional reading practices. Didactic and familial reading was modeled, yet by the nineteenth century, imaginative and intimate reading emerged. As such, this genre’s audience was almost obsessively considered; the child was flawed and needed guidance—sympathetic and sentimental guidance, to be sure—to achieve proper relationships and future successes. Bruce explained “‘the pedagogic double ideal’” captured in this great outpouring of children’s literature, especially, perhaps, as it applied to girls: “The reimagination of childhood as a separate stage of life and concern for the child’s individual spirit produced contradictions: that youth should be cultivated to be natural and instructed to be self-controlled” (51).

The second chapter, “Telling Tales: Folklore Transformed for Middle-Class Child Readers,” focuses on fairy tales, primarily the evolution of themes and practices in the Brother Grimms’ seventeen editions published between 1812 and 1857. Much has been written on fairy tales, and Bruce approaches the Grimms’ work, as well as other collections by their predecessors and contemporaries, as revelatory of social hierarchies and instructive of familial relationships. As fairy tales evolved as pedagogy and entertainment, the child reader was taught a great deal about the emotional lives of families, including parental love, filial obedience, romantic marriage, and gender roles. She also posits possible transgressive ideas in children’s reading practices around fairy tales, since they also taught story-telling. While Bruce paid attention to the real and stylized authors of the youth periodicals in the first chapter, she glossed over the biographies of Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, as well as Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, and Hans Christian Andersen. As the men began to depict companionate marriage, the importance of reproduction, and gendered household tasks—among other aspects defining the middle-class family, what insights might their own family lives (or Jacob Grimm’s lifelong bachelorhood) invite?

Chapter Three, “Reading the World: German Children’s Place in Geographic Education,” turns from domestic fictions to geography texts and atlases. With an analysis of late-eighteenth- through mid-nineteenth-century schoolbooks, Bruce cements her argument that around 1800 active learning surpassed rote memorization as the modern pedagogical approach. She provides helpful tables to summarize changes in European geographic epistemology and in geographic textbooks (87, 89). She examines the content of geography texts, world history narratives, atlases, and natural science and draws important conclusions. The content, unsurprisingly, was Eurocentric and imperialist, but also, surprisingly, incorporated current events: children’s media addressed current and ongoing political changes that were vast in this time period. Her key accomplishment in this chapter is again in the realm of children’s reading practices. The practices encouraged for both male and female child and youth readers were about thinking critically and independently, and using visual learning for fun. Bruce includes a particularly riveting sub-section, “Altering Texts,” that delves into how the children actually used their schoolbooks, writing and drawing in their books to practice place names and handwriting, to follow their teachers’ and parents’ instruction, and to be, possibly, both bored and to entertain themselves (107–113).

Chapters Four and Five pivot to writing by children. The fourth chapter, “Writing Home: Letters as a Social Practice,” provides conclusions from hundreds of letters written by children deposited in eight different archives or previously published sources. Children’s letter writing escalated between 1750 and 1850, and demonstrates both children’s growing importance in bourgeois families and their participation in their own construction of their subjecthood via adult conventions. By writing letters, they cultivated their own familial and social networks within class settings and social circles. Children’s correspondence, in turn, was clearly encouraged—maybe even demanded—as adults viewed such letter-writing activities as teaching self-discipline, self-control, and time management. Children’s letter writing, then, also exhibited the clear tension between writing as self-expression and self-fulfillment, and writing as discipline and bourgeois training. Most clearly, children’s correspondence embedded them in sentimental and social networks that were viewed by adults as essential to their middle-class development.

The final main chapter, “Writing the Self: Growing Up with Diaries,” unpacks six diaries kept by boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 20 and born between 1815 and 1830 in various German regions. With only six diaries and none from younger children, extrapolations are necessarily more cautious. Nevertheless, these are archival gems, and they do collectively demonstrate both the increasing popularity of diary-keeping for children and youth—a kind of secularized introspection—and the tension between writing for self-formation and for self-surveillance that was heightened for child and youth diarists. While these young authors expressed limited purposes for their diaries, e.g., to record personal and day-to-day events or to encourage personal development, they clearly showed that the “individual intellectual and moral development of these children and youth was seen as a critical project for their families” (154). The diarists discussed the practice itself as one of industry and diligence—critical bourgeois values—and experimentation and expression.

As Bruce articulates in her conclusion, it is common to hear in the twenty-first century that the best thing a new parent can do is read to their young child. This received wisdom was cemented in the age of revolutions in Germany as children’s education with its dueling trends to discipline and liberate was spread by the bourgeoisie. We simply cannot agree on what should be read by those same parents.