Children writing in Jane Austen's time.

Alexander, Christine ; McMaster, Juliet

IN HER DEDICATION TO The Wanderer of 1814, the mature Frances Burney wrote memorably about her youthful compositions. Young Burney had been made ashamed of writing fiction: So early was I impressed myself with ideas that fastened degradation on to this class of composition, that at the age of adolescence, I struggled against a propensity which, even in childhood, even from the moment I could hold a pen, had impelled me into its toils; and on my fifteenth birthday, I made a resolute conquest over an inclination at which I blushed, and that I had always kept secret, and I committed to the flames whatever, up to that moment, I had committed to paper. And so enormous was the pile, that I thought it prudent to consume it in the garden. (8)

The physical bulkiness of the pile of manuscript testifies to the huge and prolonged activity of writing for this young girl. Think of the creative energy she has been expending--"from the moment [she] could hold a pen"--in producing this pile, which included, alas, Caroline Vernon, the prequel to her Evelina. And she was not alone. In this essay we discuss a range of young authors and their creative and professional ambitions: both girls, who typically wrote fiction and often felt guilty about it, and boys, whose education prompted them to aspire to the more prestigious genres of poetry and nonfictional prose.

A number of young girls besides Frances Burney were writing up a storm in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, including Jane Austen herself. Of those we consider, Hannah More, born 1745, is chronologically the first; followed by Maria Edgeworth, born in 1768; and then by Jane Austen, born in 1775. Anna Maria Porter, born 1780, actually managed to publish her first set of Artless Tales, as she called them, when she was only thirteen. (1) Marjory Fleming, born the latest in 1803, also died the soonest, in 1811, when she was only eight; but she achieved some fame among Victorians, and Leslie Stephen himself chose to write her entry in The Dictionary of National Biography. Walter Scott might have said of her, as he did say of Jane Austen, "What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!" (Southam 106).

How self-conscious were these young female authors, and what were they writing about? Henry James, in one of his less lucid moments, believed that even the mature Jane Austen was hardly more conscious of her creative process than "the brown thrush who sings his story from the garden bough" (117). But we know better, and already in her juvenilia we can recognize a budding professional at work: carefully collecting and preserving her early writings in the notebooks she called Volume the First, Volume the Second, and Volume the Third, like the volumes of the standard three-decker novel of her day; providing elaborate and self-regarding letters of dedication to each item; and humorously claiming, in her dedication to Catharine, or the Bower, that the pieces she had dedicated to Cassandra, "The beautiful Cassandra, and The History of England ... have obtained a place in every library in the Kingdom, & run through threescore Editions" (Minor Works 192).

Thirteen-year-old Anna Maria Porter, like Austen, also wrote a professional-sounding dedication, but this one is for real--to the Earl of Bristol. "I am conscious," she begins, apologizing in advance--as so many authors have done before her--for the shortcomings of her work, but with the excuse that these are compositions "by a very young Authoress" (2). Little Marjory Fleming, in her journals and spontaneous-sounding verse, often seems to watch herself writing. "Isabella," she explains, referring to her beloved cousincum-governess, compels me to set down & not rise till this page is done, but it is very near finished only one line to write

she ends breathlessly but triumphantly, at the very bottom of the page (4). A poem about a brood of turkey chicks killed by rats is grandly dedicated to "Mrs H Crawfurd by the author MF." It takes the form of a mock-heroic elegy: Three Turkeys fair their last have breathed And now this world for ever leaved Their Father & their Mother too Will sigh & weep as well as you Mourning for their osprings fair Whom they did nurse with tender care Indeed the rats their bones have crunched To eternity they are launched ... A direful death indeed they had that would put any parent mad But she was more than usual calm She did not give a single dam ... Here ends this melancholy lay Farewell poor Turkeys I must say. (29-30)

The mock-heroic mode implies a sophisticated kind of knowingness shared by author and reader.

Marjory too draws attention to her tender years: even in a letter to her mother, who ought to know already, she signs off as "MF. Six years old" (162). As she accumulated the pages of her journals, in prose and verse, we find her meditating on her own talents, and regretting she hasn't done more with them: "It is Melancholy to think, that I have so many talents, & many there are that have not ... & yet they continue to do better than me" (64-65).

Authors so young, and necessarily short of experience, are often obliged to turn for their material to their reading, including to some of those novels and romances that young Burney was so ashamed of imitating. All these young female authors were avid readers. Since Marjory writes journals, she is explicit about much of her reading. She wants to read Tales of the Genii (as the Bronte children did). "The poetical works of Tomas Grey are most beautiful," she writes, "especially one the death of a favourite Cat" (10), but she finds him hard to learn by heart (10). "I am very fond of some parts of Tomsons seasons," she confides discriminatingly (12). She finds Dr. Swift's works funny, and commits some to memory (121). "Macbeth is a fearful play" (16). Like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, Marjory writes that she is "reading the Mysteries of udolpo & am much interested in the fate of poor poor Emily" (24). This is an impressive list for a six-to-eight-year-old.

But Marjory has her own reservations about fiction. "In the love novels," she writes shrewdly, "all the heroins are very desperate Isabella will not allow me to speak about lovers & heroins & its too refined for my taste" (103). Her mode is more down-to-earth and literal. After a detailed listing of the regular day's activities, from dancing at 7 a.m. and reading and repeating the Bible at 8, all the way to knitting at 7 p.m., she ends: "This is an exact description of our employments" (169-70). No wild imaginative flights for her. When she writes narrative, it is apt to be history, not fiction.

We know what young Austen thought of those characteristically "desperate" heroines of sentimental novels. Her mode was rollicking burlesque. In "Love and Friendship" her heroines Laura and Sophia are expert at those overheated manifestations of distress, swooning and running mad. At a tender moment, they famously '"fainted Alternately on a Sofa'" (MW 86). Finding her husband '"weltering in [his] blood'" after a phaeton accident (99), Laura seems to be rather proud of her physical prowess in maintaining her mad ravings: "'For two Hours did I rave thus madly and should not then have left off as I was not in the least fatigued'" (100). But thirteen-year-old Anna Maria Porter goes for the distressed heroine, hook, line, and sinker.

Porter's reading was wide too, and also deep. We have no journal entries by her to chronicle it, but from internal evidence we can be sure that she had read Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book II, with close attention, since in "Sir Alfred" she writes her own version of the allegory of Temperance. Shakespeare's The Tempest was another model: besides notable verbal borrowings--such as "fringed curtains" for eyelashes (10; Tempest 1.2)--she borrows the back-story of Prospero's usurping brother as the plot of "The Daughters of Glandour," the second of the Artless Tales, in which Prospero's magical island is transported to the Scottish isles of Mull and Skye.

In actually publishing her Artless Tales at thirteen, Porter is the most successfully professional of our young female authors. The book was published by subscription, and assembling the 466 subscribers, many of them titled, with whatever help from family members, must have been a professional experience in itself. Her tactful dedication to the Earl of Bristol seems to have persuaded him to buy ten copies! The Porter family was strapped for cash, (2) and one hopes that this brave venture was financially as well as artistically profitable.

Porter's tales are in fact far from "artless." This young author might have divined Keats's advice to Shelley, for she certainly takes pains to "load every rift ... with ore" (424). Her prose is ornate to a degree, with one purple passage melding with the next. For instance, here is her description of the salacious delights of her version of Spenser's Bower of Bliss, with imagery designed to tickle each of the senses: A group of young beauties, like so many Hebes, held crystal goblets to allure the knight. At another part, a ring of rosy-dimpled boys (shaded only by transparent gauze) scattered roses from golden baskets.... [A] canopy of carved silver [was set with] every precious stone that drinks the blaze; the crimson ruby, the varying diamond, and the purple amethyst. (19)

Rhetorical figures such as alliteration and simile come trippingly to her pen: "a beauteous nymph, like a Neried, wantonly laved her lovely limbs, whiter than the marble of the bath" (17).

It may be surprising to find a thirteen-year-old so deeply learned in sexual temptation. But all Porter's tales are love stories (for the 1796 edition she provides the subtitle Romantic Effusions of the Heart), and the lovers speak and behave according to the best literary precedents of the sentimental tradition, including gushing tears, windy sighs, elaborate declamations, fainting, and running mad. Where experience is wanting, literary models will suffice.

As one might expect of an ambitious young girl professional, Porter gives her female characters roles of authority and action. A sylph goddess assigns the young knight, Sir Alfred, his quest of rescuing a fellow knight from the toils of Lurina (13); in a later tale the heroine's witch grandmother, Morvan, adapts and survives while the hero's father, the wizard Kilwarlock, poisons himself with his own brew (97-98). A romance motif particularly dear to Porter is the cross-dressing heroine. One disguises herself as a page to deliver warnings to the man she loves against the seductive femme fatale Olivia (52). The femme fatale herself takes to men's clothing to assassinate the man who has rejected her and then, like Frances Burney's Elinor Jodrell in The Wanderer, attempts to stab herself (47). In "The Cottage of the Glen," a Scottish tale, the heroine disguises herself as a soldier and performs martial wonders in defending the man she loves in a war of clans: Olrelgin darted forward, flew through the parting soldiers, and stretching her heavy buckler before her lover, defended him with a strength more than human; love invigorated her arm, and turned the greedy swords of the rebels from her tender frame; her mild beaming eyes flashed despair and frantic valour; her snowy hand wielded the massy falchion, and struck many a warrior to the earth. (94)

It seems that young Porter revelled in this heroic fantasy life.

Down-to-earth Marjory Fleming pours scorn on these romantic fantasies. She has principles of realism: fighting is what ladies is not qualified for they would not make a good figure in battle or in a dual. Alas we females are of little use to our country.... I remember to have read about a lady who dressed herselfe in mans cloths to fight for her father ... but it is only a story out of Mother Gooses Fary tales so I do not give it credit. (125-26)

But this is not to say Marjory is against love. In fact for a little girl she is both notably susceptible and frank in confessing it: "A sailor called here to say farewell, it must be dreadful to leave his native country where he might get a wife or perhaps me, for I love him very much & with all my heart, but O I forgot Isabella forbid me to speak about love" (108).

Marjory has to remind herself of Isabella's dictum often, for the subject has an irresistible attraction for her. She is quite frank about her young love life. "I am very much acquainted with a young man called Mordecai that I am quite in love with," she writes to her mother, "another called Captain Bell, and Jamie Keith.... I've forgot to say, but I've four lovers, the other one is Henry Wilson, a very delightful boy" (161-62). Ten-year-old Jane Austen, mischievously entering fictitious couples in her father's register for calling the banns of marriage, similarly paired herself off with distinguished husbands: "Henry Frederick Howard Fitzwilliam, of London," and "Edward Arthur William Mortimer, of Liverpool" as well as with plain "Jack Smith" (Tomalin 74; Barchas 32). But where Marjory seems to have been tenderly serious, Jane was clearly joking.

Marjory's four "lovers" seem to be passing crushes, but little Marjory is movingly capable of expressing her deep devotion to her cousin/instructress, Isabella. When they are separated, she writes what we can only describe as a love poem, with echoes of Psalm 23--"The Lord is my shepherd"--as well as of other love lyrics, such as Gay's "Were I once on Greenland's shore." It ends touchingly, I have no more of poetry O Isa do remember me And try to love your Marjory. (165)

While Anna Maria Porter takes up and exploits the romantic conventions surrounding love with intense seriousness, Marjory Fleming is sceptical about the conventions but routinely falls in love with one passing male after another and can also be touchingly expressive about her love for her beloved cousin Isabella. And Jane Austen?

Austen, we know, wrote deeply moving love stories in her maturity; and the coming together of Elizabeth and Darcy, or Emma and Mr. Knightley, or Anne and Captain Wentworth is a process that both engages the characters fully and convincingly and convinces the reader that she is wonderfully acquainted with the human heart, whatever her shortage of experience of consummated sexual love. In her childhood and adolescence, however, Austen was determinedly satirical of the tender passion. Laura's love for Edward in "Love and Friendship" is strictly by the book, including all those necessary elements of love at first sight, tender sensibility, and theatrical enactment. We know it is all an elaborate act, though one that convinces the actress herself. Sir William Mountague, in the brief story of that name, suffers so severely from "the Pangs of Love" (MW 41) that he falls for three sisters simultaneously; he then gets engaged to a lovely widow, only to abandon her on their wedding day because it happens to fall on the first day of the shooting season, and he can't bear to miss a day's sport (41). Thus he progresses from one irresistible beauty to another.

The epistolary tale of "The Three Sisters" begins with a proposal over which Mary, the heroine (if we can call her that), is triumphant, but the engagement proceeds stormily with a constant battle between the principals over pin money, equipage, and so forth. By the time Austen comes to Catharine, or the Bower, she is ready to explore a young girl's susceptibility to the handsome but frivolous Edward Stanley with sympathy; before she gets to any serious commitment of feeling, however, she abandons the story. In Lady Susan, which comes later still, love for the unscrupulous heroine is merely a lure that she can use to catch unsuspecting males for her own advantage.

Is young Jane ever serious about love? There's a moment in "The Three Sisters" that gives us intimations of serious things to come. In the midst of the bickering over settlements that goes on between Mary and her disgusting fiance, Mr. Watts, he turns to her sister Sophy, hoping her expectations won't be as high as Mary's. But Sophy too has high expectations of marriage, though they don't focus on property: "'I expect my Husband to be good tempered & Chearful; to consult my Happiness in all his Actions, & to love me with Constancy & Sincerity'" (64). This is the positive value, in the midst of all the negative satire, but in context it is thrown away: "Mr Watts stared," we hear, hardly believing so uncouth a sentiment.

Austen's early satire of the convention, and of mercenary motives for marriage, plays its own role when she comes to write her mature love stories. In her youth she was a scholar of the love convention as of the mercenary motive for marriage, expert but uninvolved. When she came to write love stories of her own, her scholarship availed her well in exploring the complexly mixed motives and attitudes of lovers--Emma sorting out whether she is or isn't actually in love with Frank Churchill and almost taking her own pulse on the matter (E 297), or Elizabeth confessing she first loved Darcy after '"seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley'" (PP 373). There is always the admixture of convention and self-delusion to complicate the heroines' loves. The early satiric explorations were not thrown away.

Apart from notorious cases of destruction like Burney's bonfire of her early manuscripts, girls seem to have been more astute than boys at preserving their juvenilia, along with their early samplers, paint-boxes, and other treasured mementos of girlhood. Although some girls, like Anna Maria Porter and her sister Jane, were encouraged by family to publish their early writing, young boys who wrote commonly saw themselves as professionals and expected to see their work in print.

There were a number of young male authors of the period who were particularly successful in having their work published. The most famous was the teenage superstar Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), Wordsworth's "marvellous Boy" (43), who gained heroic status as a type of iconic Romantic poet following his sensational suicide by drinking arsenic at the age of seventeen. Chatterton came from a family of church sextons in Bristol, and as a young boy he fell in love with the illuminated capitals of an old music manuscript that his mother used to teach him the alphabet (Gregory 4). He was entranced by all things medieval and spent hours copying medieval script and drawing heraldic images. At the age of eleven he began publishing in local periodicals but soon found he could only make money if he pretended that his verse imitations of fifteenth-century romances were not by a twelve-year-old boy but were the work of a medieval monk, Rowley, whom he invented. His painstaking calligraphy using old inks and parchment convinced antiquarians and booksellers, and he did a roaring trade until his cover was blown. He clearly had extraordinary literary talent (he published political articles, eclogues, lyrics, operas, and satires) but, because of the forgery, his work has never been quite respectable in scholarly circles.

The widely publicized controversy over Chatterton's forged poems highlighted the plight of precocious but poor young writers. His tragic death was widely commemorated, not least in the famous painting by Henry Wallis (1856), now in Tate Britain in London, which symbolically features a treasure chest of juvenilia in the foreground. A surprising number of youthful poems at the time were elegies on Chatterton, including poems by the thirteen-year-old Coleridge (1772-1834) and the teenage Henry Kirke White (1785-1806), whose juvenilia later inspired the young Brontes. The poet laureate Robert Southey (with Joseph Cottle) even produced a new edition of Chatterton's works (1803), which are of course all juvenilia, and also edited Henry Kirke White's remains (1807). Chatterton heads a group of ambitious teenage writers who were all significant in their time, who all died young, and whose work has since been identified as establishing a tradition of juvenilia. (3) They produced work that "unapologetically asserted its importance and refused to remain mere prelude" to later works (Langbauer, "Juvenilia"). Their youthfulness was, in Langbauer's words, "a shared signifier" (2), and they deliberately alluded to each other. Their publications celebrated juvenilia, and their young admirers followed suit. In fact, in 1801 the seventeen-year-old Leigh Hunt, inspired by Chatterton, actually named his first collection of poetry Juvenilia--a title that clearly proclaims the importance of youth and that suggests young writers have distinctive things to say.

If the girls were writing about love and personal relations, what were the boys writing about? And what made them take up the pen rather than kick a ball around the playground or ride horses or take up a job if they were from the poorer classes? Boys were encouraged at school or by their tutors to write: writing was actually seen as an elite, masculine occupation that might endorse a gentleman or provide necessary credentials for an aspiring schoolmaster. Chatterton was an exception: basically self-taught, he was initially seen as rather a dunce, but he studied for years secretly in his attic, determined to be a famous writer.

Michael Bruce (1746-1767), a precocious young Scottish poet, hoped to run his own school. Like his compatriot "Robbie" Burns, Bruce was reared in a crofter's cottage, and his schooling was often interrupted by having to herd cattle on the hills around Loch Lomond. Burns was actually known as "the Ploughman poet" because of his manual labor from the age of twelve on his father's farm. Wordsworth commemorated him alongside Chatterton as one "who walked in glory and in joy, / Following his plough" (45-46). The compensation for long hours toiling on the land was that both poets were in tune with nature, and this sympathy influenced their early poetry, leading to Burns's famous nature poems that made him a pioneer of Romanticism.

Like most male teenage writers of the period, Michael Bruce and Robert Burns wrote poetry rather than the novelistic prose we generally find in the juvenilia of young women. Poetry was the elite genre practiced by young men; they also wrote nonfiction articles and edited school literary magazines, such as the famous Eton College periodical The Microcosm (1786-1788). The Loiterer (1789-1790), edited by Jane Austen's brothers at St. John's College, Oxford, is in the same category. Written almost entirely by James and Henry Austen, its articles satirize university life and parody popular fiction. It has the same exuberance and mix of contents as Jane Austen's early writing. A number of parallels with her own juvenilia probably indicate her close reading of The Loiterer (Alexander xxii). Critics have suggested that she may even have contributed the letter from "Sophia Sentiment," published in the number for 28 March 1789 (Alexander 345).

Most boys too wrote copiously about classical subjects gleaned from their lessons in Latin and Greek, a practice that lasted into the nineteenth century. Alexander Pope's early works, published in the posthumous collection as "Juvenilia" (1751), are good examples of the practice--in his words, "a happy Imitation of some famous Ancient" (Weinbrot 5). Girls were generally prohibited from formal lessons in the classics, which were deemed too difficult for the female mind and unladylike. Some girls, of course, bucked the system and gleaned knowledge of the classics at home. Hannah More, for example, in 1763 at eighteen wrote in the pastoral tradition and published a surprisingly popular drama for girls called A Search after Happiness (1773), written in the form of the Latin eclogues she had read. The preface states that the play is "a substitute for the very improper custom of allowing plays, ... not always of the purest kind, to be acted by young ladies in boarding schools." Ever the prude, she solved the problem of the sexes in her play by recommending that girls be satisfied with an "Adamless Eden" and asserting that "happiness exists but in the mind" (29). Apparently, "in the performance of the drama, ... the gay and the sober Bristol people went wild" (Harland 18-19); the play was enthusiastically admired and thought of as great entertainment among her sober audience of parents and girls.

Even boys from poor families (like Bruce and Burns) generally had some early classical training from parents or the village schoolmaster, and boys also imitated earlier English models, such as the poets Spenser and Milton. The teenage Byron's Hours of Idleness (1807) is another example of juvenile poetry in this tradition, as is Robert Browning's first collection of verse, Incondita, written when he was twelve and inspired in turn by Byron (Alexander and McMaster 22). Leigh Hunt's early poetry also demonstrates the classical ideals of friendship and his creative imitation of earlier English poets. His long poem "The Palace of Pleasure" is particularly ambitious: like Porter's "Sir Alfred" in Artless Tales, it is an accomplished imitation of Book II of Spenser's The Faerie Queene. Hunt maintains the antiquated language and spelling of the original, but modifies the poem to reflect modern sensibilities. His hero is not so much a warrior knight as a modern Englishman who must overcome his yearnings for conspicuous wealth, material goods, and comfort in a land where many now labor in factories in horrific working conditions for little reward. Already in his early writing we can see the political journalist that Hunt would become.

Jane Austen herself was a master of imitation in her clever parodies of the absurdities of romance and sentimental fiction, as in "Love and Friendship." However, there is another literary genre that Austen took a swipe at: popular history. If girls were excluded from the classics, they could instead seize on history as an acceptable outlet for intellectual ambition.

In her seminal work in the moral education of generations of girls, titled Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady (1773), Hester Chapone declared: "the principal study, I would recommend, is history. I know of nothing equally proper to entertain and improve at the same time" (140). History was "proper" because it was harmless public knowledge; it involved real events, "the truth" as opposed to the invented narratives of the novel, seen as immoral and insincere by Protestant readers well into the nineteenth century. And history could entertain the reader with a dramatic narrative of "High Life"--the danger of the battlefield or the glamour of the court--from a distance; it could educate women "at the expense of others." Through history, girls might avoid contamination with the real world while vicariously experiencing its political and social life, something the young Brontes perfected in their Angrian and Gondal writings. (4)

Chapone adds that knowledge of history would also protect young women from "trifling insipid companions" (234), something the sixteen-year-old Austen complains of in her early novella Catharine. The heroine, Kitty, is devastated to find that Camilla Stanley "professed a love of Books without Reading, was Lively without Wit, and generally good humoured without Merit" (MW 198). Such ignorant companions are detrimental, Chapone tells us, since they are "so ill qualified for the friendship and conversation of a sensible man" (234). She claims a role for history even in the marriage market.

The growing demand for schoolroom history, however, led to an escalating industry in popular textbooks that marketed a variety of bowdlerized history, from facts and dates for rote learning to monarch-by-monarch accounts of the kings and queens of England. The young Jane Austen was particularly incensed by Oliver Goldsmith's 1771 The History of England, (5) which she thought insultingly simple, politically bigoted, and dishonest in its plagiarism of the superior history of Hume. Her own history, dated 1791 but transcribed in late 1792 into the fair-copy Volume the Second, is an equally one-sided, hilarious parody of Goldsmith, as she proclaims on her title page, "By a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian" (MW 138). She states that her aim is "to vent my Spleen against, & shew my Hatred to all those people whose parties or principles do not suit with mine, & not to give information" (MW 140).

Cassandra Austen, now nineteen years old, joins in the fun and illustrates Jane's kings and queens with imitations of the woodcut medallion images of Goldsmith's abridged edition. She wickedly disrupts their historical pose by clothing the monarchs in brightly coloured modern dress and then enhances the joke by using portraits of family members and friends to represent individual monarchs. (6) Mrs. Austen is portrayed as Elizabeth--positioned on the manuscript page of The History of England opposite Mary, Queen of Scots. Jane is portrayed as Mary, Queen of Scots, her favorite Stuart monarch, devious and ambitious but also a heroine of romance, who is tragically beheaded by her cousin Elizabeth.

Cassandra's image of Jane both parodies and confirms her sister's fierce partiality for the Stuarts demonstrated in her text. Austen's self-identification with Mary may derive from the pro-Stuart historian John Whitaker, whom Austen cites and who characterizes Mary, Queen of Scots, as "young, beautiful and accomplished," with an ambition to "appear as a woman of intellect, and to be considered as a woman of taste" (Upfal and Alexander xlviii). For Austen, Mary was "entirely innocent," a young woman guilty only of "Imprudencies into which she was betrayed by the openness of her Heart, her Youth, & her Education" (MW 146). Even worse to the young historian, Mary was betrayed by her cousin, another woman in whom she had placed confidence and from whom she had every reason to expect protection: Oh! what must this bewitching Princess whose only friend was then the Duke of Norfolk, and whose only ones now are Mr Whitaker, Mrs Lefroy, Mrs Knight & myself, who was abandoned by her son, confined by her Cousin, Abused, reproached & vilified by all, what must not her most noble mind have suffered when informed that Elizabeth had given orders for her Death! (145)

Mary is discussed at length within the entry on Elizabeth, as if this were the most important aspect of Elizabeth's reign. Austen roundly condemns Elizabeth as "that disgrace to humanity, that pest of society" (145).

Marjory Fleming also wrote a "Life of Mary Queen of Scots," a historically accurate poem of 208 lines. Her history is full of bravado and, as in young Austen's, Elizabeth is the villain, "a cross old maid" (147). But Mary was much loved by all Both by the great and by the small But hark her soul to heaven did rise And I do think she gained a prise For I do think she would not go Into the awfull place below There is a thing that I must tell Elizabeth went to fire & hell Him who will teach her to be cevel It must be her great friend the divel. (147-48)

The same mixture of wisdom and naivete that intrigues adult readers of her journal is evident here in her negotiation of Mary Stuart's love affairs. In fact, history gives the young Marjory the opportunity to explore further those peculiarities of adult behavior that she finds puzzling. For Marjory, Mary Stuart was a fascinating source of adventure and "troubelsom & tiresome" love (109). She writes quizzically about Mary Stuart's affair with Darnley: A nobles son a handsome lad, by some queer way or other had Got quite the better of her hart With him she always talked apart Silly he was but very fair A greater buck was not found there. (137)

Soon after she has to explain yet another of Mary's affairs, this time with Rizzio, for "He was her greatest favourite / Him she caresed with all her might" (138). Marjory, like other child writers, refused to accept love and sex as out of bounds, and she clearly found history aided and abetted her.

These are just two examples of the many youthful literary constructions of Mary, Queen of Scots, that continued to be produced by girls well into the nineteenth century, including by the Brontes. Mary Stuart became a heroic type in their early writing too: a flawed but powerful female model for Emily, and an ambiguous, elusive beauty for Charlotte Bronte. Mary Stuart's appeal for these writers is not simply one of historical notoriety and the romance of past times but of self-identification. Much of her story is of a young princess struggling with her destiny, a victim with whom girls in particular could associate. As Chatterton was a culture hero and role model for the boy writers, Mary, Queen of Scots, seems to have been a heroine and muse for the girls.

One young writer, whose mature novels the young Jane Austen much admired, not only used history but also experimented with documenting her own times. This was Maria Edgeworth, of whom Austen playfully commented to her niece Anna: "I have made up my mind to like no Novels really, but Miss Edgeworth's, Yours & my own" (28 September 1814). But Austen was serious enough to present the revered novelist of Belinda (1801) with a pre-publication copy of Emma (1816). Austen seems to have appreciated Edgeworth's ability to convey social conventions through brilliant dialogue and what Sir Walter Scott referred to as those "striking pictures of manners" and "Irishisms" that he was determined to emulate in relation to Scotland (qtd. in Edgeworth xi--xii). These features are all admirably displayed in Edgeworth's earliest surviving drama, The Double Disguise, written at eighteen and first produced as a household entertainment for Christmas 1786. (7)

The action of The Double Disguise turns on the device of a lottery ticket and the use of two hilarious disguises by the hero, Charles Westbrooke, to test the values and fidelity of his betrothed, Dolly. Dolly's father, Justice Cocoa, the well-to-do Tipperary grocer who has risen in the world, speaks an early version of the Irish lingo that later appeared in Edgeworth's famous novel Castle Rackrent (1800). Her interest in realism and her use of her Anglo-Irish heritage meant that her comedies introduced a new note of political and social critique, and in the process she too could explore relations between the sexes.

What can we conclude about teenagers writing in Austen's time from the evidence of their own practice? Girls like Anna Maria Porter, Marjory Fleming, Maria Edgeworth, and Austen herself were fascinated by human relations and the mysteries of love: if the topic was risky or difficult to treat realistically, they could disguise their interest with allegory, satire, or history. They could explore "the Pangs of Love" (Austen, MW 41) by using motifs from the classics or from respected earlier English works like Spenser's The Faerie Queene; they could identify with a young heroine like Mary, Queen of Scots, and explore her victim status in relation to sex and power. The boys were encouraged to use not only history but also the classics; their wider range of reading is generally reflected in their juvenilia. Most remarkably, so many of these young writers, especially boys, were confident and self-aware published authors. They knew they were writing in a genre of juvenilia or youthful writing; they were writing from a unique perspective and were conscious that they had something to say. Jane Austen is now the most famous of these young writers, but she was not alone.

NOTES

(1.) Anna Maria Porter published three sets of Artless Tales, in 179S (republished by the Juvenilia Press), 1795, and 1796. The Juvenilia Press edition of the first set is based on the only copy text extant, which was kindly lent to us by Lucy Magruder; we have found no reference to any other copy in major world libraries. There has been some confusion as to whether the 1795 and 1796 editions are simply reprints of the 1793 set, but we have ascertained that the tales are different. The 1796 edition is subtitled Romantic Effusions of the Heart.

(2.) See the biographical information in Leslie Robertson's introduction and Lesley Peterson on "The Subscription List to Artless Tales" both in the Juvenilia Press edition of Artless Tales.

(3.) Laurie Langbauer and Katherine Kittridge have independently discussed the beginning of this tradition that starts in the late eighteenth century and peaks in the nineteenth century. Langbauer points out that it coincides with a decrease in child mortality, new educational opportunities, an expanded middle-class with more resources, and a growing periodical press ("Prolepsis" 3-10). Kittridge has identified 125 books of poetry published between 1770 and 1830 by authors under the age of twenty-one; 89 of these were published between 1790 and 1820.

(4.) The Bronte juvenilia range widely across topics such as warfare, exploration, politics, sex, and power: see Alexander and Smith (209-15, 277-81).

(5.) The family copy of Goldsmith's History contains over a hundred marginal comments by Jane Austen, written about 1791 and reflecting her distaste for the text: see Alexander (xliii n.45).

(6.) This equation between Cassandra's portraits and Austen family likenesses has only recently been recognized: for a summary discussion see Alexander (xxiii-xxviii). See also Alexander and Upfal as well as Upfal and Alexander.

(7.) The Juvenilia Press has just published this play for the first time, using the manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The premier performance by theatre students at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, can be viewed on itube: see Juvenilia Press Homepage: https:// www.arts.unsw.edu.au/juvenilia/.

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CHRISTINE ALEXANDER and JULIET McMASTER Christine Alexander, FAHA, is Emeritus Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales and has run the Juvenilia Press since 2002. She has published on the Brontes, Austen, literary juvenilia, and critical editing, including a recent edition of Austen's juvenilia: Love and Friendship and Other Youthful Writings. Juliet McMaster, Distinguished Professor Emerita of the University of Alberta and author of books on Austen, Thackeray, Trollope, and Dickens, founded the Juvenilia Press and with Christine Alexander co-edited The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf.