Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America. Patricia Crain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 247.

Abstract

In the last ten years, there has been a surge of work on the intersections of childhood studies and critical race theory in the nineteenth-century United States. Building on earlier historical work such as Wilma King's Stolen Childhood (1995), literary scholars including Anna Mae Duane, Robin Bernstein, Caroline Levander, and Nazera Sadiq Wright have examined the ways that discourses of childhood defined and were defined by discourses of whiteness and that childhood, in turn, became central to antiracist movements. It may seem counterintuitive to include Patricia Crain's Reading Children in this body of work, because race is not among the terms explicitly named in her project. Yet the constellation of topics that her research tacklesnamed in the subtitle as "Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood"-provides part of the substructure for understanding how childhood came to have such influence in US notions of race. Literacy, Crain argues, became one of the primary ways to assert child personhood and, as such, also became a marker of children to whom personhood would be denied. The instability of all children in the eighteenth century between possession and possessor, Crain's work suggests, offered a rubric for limiting rights to white children in the later nineteenth century. Crain's study, though, is by no means restricted to questions of race. Childhood as we know it, Crain argues, became inseparable from images of children reading because the nineteenth century viewed reading as central to children's claims to personhood and property rights. Beginning with chapters on the once widely popular texts The Histor y of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765) and Babes in the Wood (1879), Crain suggests that literacy Modern Philology, volume 117, number 1.