Volume 7, Number 1, June 2025

EN:

This essay presents a rough outline of the “what, how, and why” of the collaborative work done in English 425: “Literature, Archives, and Original Research,” an intensive research undergraduate course at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Fall 2024 that focused on juvenilia. The team included a class of thirteen undergraduates (all years; all majors), five PhD students from English and Comparative Literature, one professor from the same department, instructional specialists from Ackland Art Museum, and librarians galore from Wilson Library Special Collections and Davis Library, all at UNC Chapel Hill. We met with two or three museum and four or five library colleagues; but many others, behind the scenes, made our course possible.Eight members of this team tell their story from the points of view of four students, three librarians, and the professor. The projects the class undertook show what can happen when participants believe in each other as partners. They also show how young researchers occupy an exceptional position when it comes to considering what young artists and authors care about and why it matters.

EN:

The paper explores the teaching of juvenilia in the context of an ongoing crisis in the humanities, arguing the need to introduce university students to the study of child writing by including it when studying non-juvenile texts, as distinct from staging a separate course on it. It offers examples of teaching John Ruskin’s juvenilia with his mature work but also with romanticism more generally. Ruskin’s early poetry can be read as evasive, the young writer cutting himself off from examining his feelings as they emerge in the writing process, especially as he documents what might be very personal topics such as his interactions with his parents and his developing maturation. The paper argues that students reading Ruskin’s juvenilia will have insights into The King of the Golden River, a mature work, and the masculinities it represents because it too refuses to pursue difficult themes. In a similar way, his juvenilia can be used in the undergraduate classroom to enhance understandings of romanticism in that the evasiveness in Ruskin’s poetry can be read as the consequence of Ruskin’s reading of the romantics and especially the image of the romantic child as developed in Wordsworth’s verse. Though the paper is on pedagogy and juvenilia, most of it consists of an analysis of Ruskin’s early verse.

EN:

In 2015, the British Royal Collection republished one of Queen Victoria’s childhood stories: Alice (c.1835) and renamed it as The Adventures of Alice Laselles (2015). Along with its new title, the text was given a new ending, new illustrations, and a number of in-text edits including the alteration of the lead character’s surname. These edits were crowned, no pun intended, by the cover matter which proclaimed the story as being written by both “Alexandrina Victoria aged 10 ¾” and “Queen Victoria”. In this article, I discuss the impact of these interventions upon both Alice and The Adventures of Alice Laselles, and show how they have come to construct, reconstruct, and reduce the body of the child author. I suggest that The Adventures of Alice Laselles, rather than telling the story of Alice herself, instead documents the impact of adult bodily interventions upon a child-authored text.

EN:

The Diary of Anne Frank is a salient example of how valuable a youthful journal can be historically, as well as for access to the child’s subjectivity and creativity. This essay suggests that juvenile journals can provide excellent matter for a specialized course on the genre.

With a focus on the young writer’s need for necessary writing materials, the author examines journals by a number of young diarists of different periods: Marjory Fleming, writing in Regency Scotland, who died at eight years old, but still made it into the Dictionary of National Biography; the teenage Richard Doyle, already developing his artistic talents and turning professional in the busy London in 1840; Elizabeth Thompson Butler, struggling to achieve recognition as a Victorian female painter of battle scenes; Iris Vaughan, writing in South Africa at the time of the Boer War; seven-year-old Opal Whiteley, still on the threshold of literacy, recording her close encounters with animal life in the logging camps of Oregon in the early twentieth century; and teenager Hope Hook, recounting her crossing of Canada in 1907, as part of her family’s move to emigrate; and up to Anne Frank, a teenager in the Second World War.

These young writers, artists, and budding professionals provide vivid insights into their thinking and writing processes, as well as windows on the history and culture of their day as perceived by a child.