… We now know that there had been published in England, probably as early as the late seventeenth century, books expressly for children. While the intent of these texts was clearly to instruct, they approached that intent from the point of view of children, rather than being slight revisions of adult texts. Throughout the eighteenth century, these instructional books became increasingly recreational, and sometimes even whimsical. In 1736 Thomas Boreman published A Description of a Great Variety of Animals and Vegetables, especially for the Entertainment of Youth. [John] Newbery followed in 1744 with the Little Pretty Pocket Book, and continued to produce texts of this type until his death in 1767. Some of his other titles are: the Liliputian Magazine, 1753; Food for the Mind: A New Riddle Book, 1758; and Nurse Truelove's Christmas Box, 1760 (Muir, p. 58-76). It is consoling to learn that literature intended specifically for children finally blossomed in the same century which saw the great flowering of the English novel.

But here we may say with Alice, "Curiouser and curiouser." For we must notice, with some puzzlement, that the only accurate label for reading matter intended for children is "children's literature," a most general phrase. Where, we wonder, in this great age of fiction, is the children's novel? We may receive a quick reply: Goody Two-Shoes and its many imitations, the adapted fairy tales, historical romances, fables and moral tales, and the abridged pocket volumes of Richardson's novels. But the pocket abridgements of Richardson, published by Baldwin in 1756 under the title The Paths of Virtue delineated, were still adult novels, "familiarised and Adapted to the Capacities of Youth," as Baldwin announced. And the other examples are not what we understand by the word "novel." So we may persist, where is the children's novel?

I believe I have discovered the answer to that question: Sarah Fielding's The Governess, first published in 1749. I had first decided to read this work out of curiosity; I read on with genuine pleasure.

Fielding's does share with many other children's works the intent of moral instruction; she states in her Dedication that she writes to help her readers "cultivate a love of Virtue." The significant difference between The Governess and the other works is also clear from the conclusion to the Dedication: This virtue I have endeavoured to inculcate, by those Methods of Fable and Moral, which have been recommended by the wisest Writers, as the most effectual means of conveying useful Instruction." Fielding's intent is to help readers learn to become virtuous; morals are her method, as part of her content. She skillfully weaves a tapestry of teaching devices—parables, fairy tales, and songs—into a story of little girls learning through precept and experience the very moral character that their collective story is about. The "Methods" which are the "most effectual means of conveying useful Instruction" are embedded in and framed by a larger structure, the novel itself.

Historians of children's literature tend to misread The Governess; but they confirm, however obliquely, that it is indeed a novel. Cornelia Meigs declares there is a narrative, though she finds it "rambling and eventless." She goes on to note a most "effective" and "excellent" feature of the work—Fielding's characterization of the little girls: "Each one is shown as a distinct personality" and each biographical account "actually gives a cross section of the situations out of which children's characters are formed" (p. 73-4). Fielding's work has characters (and characterization), plot, setting, conflict—all the elements of fiction. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, Sarah Fielding was a sensitive observer and a shrewd rhetorician. She understood her audience and her culture. Her several works indicate she was exremely well read, and thoroughly familiar with the education treatises of Locke and Fenelon. Born in 1710, Fielding would have grown up reading the same romances, histories, moral tales, and fairly tales as Betty, sister to Bickerstaffe's godson. A highly respected novelist by 1749, Fielding could combine her understanding of how to write successful fiction, her memory of childhood reading, and her knowledge of educat, both in its general practice and its more ideal possibilities. She does precisely this in The Governess.

The novel tells the tale of nine school girls and how they grow, primarily through their own voices. Each child narrates her own history, either in response to or as stimulus for another child's autobiography. Within or between each life story is another story which illustrates the vice and virtue each child confesses. Thus the story is stories. The characters read or tell stories; we read their reading. The content of Fielding's text becomes the content of the lesson the girls read, hear, and ultimately learn.

The outer frame of the novel is initiated by a terrific brawl—occasioned by an apple of unusual appeal—fought by the little girls. Mrs. Teachum's pedagogical methods, the reading and discussion of stories, constitute both the governess's response to her students and the inside frame of the novel. Mrs. Teachum explains to Jenny Peace, her eldest pupil, that the girls must try to learn the nature of their misbehaviour, why fighting is not reasonable and will therefore ultimately make them miserable, even if they do manage, by force, to achieve temporarily what they think they want. Jenny begins the inner frame of the work by reading a fairy tale: "The History of the cruel Giant Barbarico, the good Giant Benefico, and the pretty little dwarf Mignon." The moral of this tale is that doing bad deeds makes the doer miserable. That in itself is an obvious lesson. The story which teaches it captivates the children precisely as Barbarico had captured Mignon; they become actively involved in and visibly moved by the activities and fate of the characters.

At the conclusion of the reading, Mrs. Teachum listens to Jenny's report of its reception. She then explains the proper way of reading stories: to find the moral. The next day Jenny teaches the other pupils, applying the Socratic method Mrs. Teachum had used. Fielding's emphasis on demonstrating the process of teaching and learning is a characteristic seldom shared by the subgenre of the school story as it developed from this now obscure origin.

The demonstration of process and the immediacy of identification and applicability render the life stories of the girls extremely effective. The delight given by the interpolated tales enhance the effectiveness of the primary story. The tales break the possible tedium of the repeated pattern of life-stories. Moreover, they show not only what materials students might be reading, in and out of school; they actually become those very materials. It is through them that the pupils of the Little Female Academy and those who read their story are taught.

Children easily identify with the little girls in their school, learning as they learn. Readers learn from the interpolated tales also, both through identification and by moral precept. The first brief tale emphasizes the idea of worthy friendship. The good giant loves the dwarf as a brother; that love extends to the mortals, Fidus and Amata, whose feelings for one another are based on tender regard and the joy of companionship. Fielding's picture of active friendship allows her to demonstrate lessons of equality. Despite their size difference, for example, Benefico and Mignon are good friends and their respective sizes allow them to help one another and the mortals equally, though in different ways.

It is important to note that Fielding creates for the girls in the academy and for the girl readers an action-packed tale—and one which includes an actively participating female. The members of the Little Female Academy have just demonstrated their own vigorous if not commendable actions, leaving no doubt they are quite unlikely to abide by only the passive abstract. Fielding's giants stride and threaten; they are very noisy. The dwarf and mortals undergo great risks, in the name of friendship. And, at the conclusion of the reading, the girls respond actively to the adventures and to the effects of doing the good.

The next tale, also about friendship, illustrates the follies of prevarication and the rewards of honest and faithful regard. Drawing upon the romance tradition, this tale is perhaps the most novel-like of any in the book. Caelia and Chloe experience their first anxiety, folly, and grief when they discover they each love Sempronius. Pupils and readers learn about honesty from this tale; they also receive a vision of the constructive kind of loving relationship which must form the basis of an enduring marriage. Fielding also emphasizes that friendship between members of the same gender is just as valuable and sacred as heterosexual friendship, and must be worked at just as carefully.

The longest story in the novel is another fairy tale, the story of Princess Hebe. The usurped princess flees with her mother from the evils of political greed as personified by Hebe's uncle, the Regent. They are rescued by the wise fairy Sybella. The Queen's fondest wish for her daughter is that Hebe acquire "that only wisdom which would enable her to see and follow what was her own true good, to know the value of everything around her, and to be sensible, that the following the paths of goodness and performing her duty, was the only road to content and happiness" (p. 136). The ensuing story of Hebe's frailty, vanity, and disobedience, which almost cause the distraction of Sybella as well as of Hebe herself, constitutes a moving, graphic, and effective female Bildungsroman. This story reiterates Fielding's point about proper and worthy friendship, emphasizes the lesson about same-sex friendship, and demonstrates the positive powers of women as rulers, counsellors, and teachers.

Throughout the novel, Fielding takes great care to show that girls can and should be as sprightly, vigorous, and responsible as boys, and that there need be no dichotomy between an active life and a virtuous one. She shows this especially through the tales. The characters in them are females who have been exploited by males but who have outwitted them. Moreover, the female rulers govern according to a model quite different from those of the males who have preceded them. Fielding renders this extraordinarily positive image of active women in positions of power with a most convincing realism. Perhaps shrewdly for her time, and certainly sadly for ours, she frames that image within the traditional and non-threatening devices of parable and fairy tale, thus rendering the image invisible to those who cannot or will not see. As Mrs. Teachum says at the conclusion of an exercise in literary criticism: "I have only pointed out a few passages to show you, that tho' it is the nature of comedy to end happily, and therefore the good characters must be successful in the last act, yet the moral lies deeper …" (p. 196).

The Governess was a popular work, regularly reprinted throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Why then has it not been identified as the first novel in English intended specifically for children? There are several likely causes for the obscurity of The Governess. The chronological publishing lists found in various forms in the several histories of children's literature suggest some possibilities. Percy Muir's work, as always, is the most helpful of these sources. In addition to his careful lists, the titles of which reveal no works of fiction before that 1766 edition of Goody Two-Shoes, Muir reminds us that while The Governess was repeatedly reissued, it was frequently in bowdlerised editions, the "obnoxious" parts having been excised. Those portions regarded as obnoxious by Mrs. Trimmer and Mary Martha Sherwood were the fairy tales. Thus children's literature historians might assume The Governess to be exclusively moral instruction.

We might wonder then, if the historians have actually read The Governess. We know, however, that Corne lia Meigs read and disliked it. We should also recall two other, related points. Children's literature scholarship is relatively recent, most of it having occurred since World War II. Significant, I believe, is the fact that Sarah Fielding virtually disappears from scholarly studies in the mid-1940's, although she had figured prominently in histories of the development of the novel from the beginning of that enterprise. The most assiduous of historians are of necessity selective; they must rely upon certain signs to help them be so. If no signs or a few which seem to be negative appear about a particular text, that text will be either ignored or the dubious analysis perpetuated. This is doubtless part of the cause of The Governess's fate.

I can imagine two other causes. The first is related to the historical, textual one: it appears that scholars have not expected to find a real novel for children at the very early date of 1749. More particularly, they seem not to have expected that the first real novel in English for children would be so much more sophisticated than the other extant literature for children, especially so early. And finally, they seem not to have expected that this highly important creation might be written by a woman, especially, again, at this early date.

But the most likely cause for the non-candidacy of The Governess as the first novel in English for children is the content of the novel itself. The work is about little girls; while it could appeal to boys, girls are its primary intended audience. The Governess is a story of little girls learning to read, through the reading of books, their own lives. In 1749, Sarah Fielding was, as is typical of her works, far ahead of her time.

Works Cited

Bingham, Jane, and Grayce Scholt. Fifteen Centuries of Children's Literature. London: Greenwood Press, 1980.

Ellis, Alec. A History of Children's Reading and Literature. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1968.

Fielding, Sarah. The Governess, of the Little Female Academy. London: A. Millar, 1749; Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1791. Page references are to the 1791 edition.

Grey, Jill, ed. The Governess, facsimile edition. London: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Meigs, Cornelia, et. al. A Critical History of Children's Literature. New York: Macmillan, 1953.

Muir, Percy. English Children's Books, 1600 to 1900. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1954.