Juvenilia is the name given to creative work produced by recognized authors and artists when they were children and young adults. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was a fruitful time for juvenilia, especially that of writers. Jane Austen, the Brontë family, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, amongst others, among others, wrote extensively when they were young. Many of their manuscripts have survived, and a few are available on the Internet. The childhood and adolescent creative work of authors who became famous provides interesting comparison with the work of children and students we know in our lives. As editors of Stone Soup we have published extraordinary work by young writers, work that compares favorably with the best juvenilia. What makes writers, though, is not what they write as children and teenagers, but that they keep on telling stories throughout their lives. The juvenilia you will find on the Internet, in your local libraries and in the creative work publish in the pages of Stone Soup will provide entertainment for yourself, for your children, and for your students. And remember, after getting lost in the world of Jane Austen and the Brontë family, come back to us for the latest and most wonderful work by young people, being written today! To get you started on your journey through juvenilia, we have pulled together some links for you below. If you are interested in the original manuscripts, many of them tiny, handmade and handwritten books belonging to the authors, the British Library web pages have some excellent images and short articles of and about them. Jane Austen (1775-1817) Love and Freindship [sic], circa 1786, age 11 (see also our post on the 2016 movie by Whit Stillman with the same name, but actually based on a later novel, Lady Susan) Frederick and Elfrida, circa 1788, age 12-14 The Three Sisters, circa 1790, age 15-16 You can read more about Jane Austen’s juvenilia, and see images of some of her original hand-written notebooks, at the British Library website. Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855), Emily Brontë (1818-1848), Ann Brontë (1820-1849), (and Bramwell Brontë, 1817-1848) The young sisters and their brother created entire imaginary worlds–such as Emily’s Gondal and Bramwell’s Angria– which they wrote about prolifically in their youth, and produced tiny handwritten newspapers and magazines for themselves. The Brontë Sisters Web by Mitsuharu Matsuoka More links from Great Britain about the Brontës There are notes about and images of the Brontës’ notebooks, and an interesting video of a discussion about the Brontës’ juvenilia (in which experts handle the tiny original materials), at the British Library website. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) Poems written around 1843, age 14-15
Juvenilia
Young Writers of the past: The Young Visiters [sic], or Mr. Salteena’s Plan (1919) by Daisy Ashford, age 8-9
The Young Visiters sold 300,000 copies in 1919! And that was just in Britain! The introduction to The Young Visiters was written by J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan. In Britain, The Young Visiters was published by the prestigious house of Chatto and Windus; in the U.S. by George H. Doran. The book was published without corrections for spelling or punctuation. The first third of the twentieth century was a period of great ferment in the arts. This is the time when the arts became more abstract, this including painting, sculpture, music and the literary arts as well. Many of the period’s finest writers, particularly in Europe, began complex literary experiments, including jettisoning standard grammatical forms and typographic conventions: The Death of Vergil by the German author Hermann Broch, Finnegan’s Wake by the Irish author James Joyce, and The Sound and the Fury by the American writer William Faulkner are classic examples of authors stretching the limits of standard grammatical form. Publishing children’s writing without corrections in 1919 spoke, not to indulgence or a lapse in standards, but to a courageous look at the achievements of naïve artists, of artists working without a full complement of technical skills, but with something to say and the will to say it. When we published Crippled Detectives by Lee Tandy Schwartzman in 1978, it was no longer possible, if one wanted the work to be taken seriously, to publish a child’s manuscript virtually as is. Or at least so it seemed to us then, and still does today. We standardize spelling and punctuation in Stone Soup (and did so in Crippled Detectives), although we do leave grammatical innovations, as we did in the work we published by Huong Nguyen. As you read The Young Visiters, you will find yourself immersed in the world of popular romantic fiction of the first decades of this century. Re-reading The Young Visiters makes me feel much more tolerant of student writing that is heavily influenced by mass culture. It reminds me that we learn by copying; that the desire, and then the will to carry through with the desire to tell a story is the true underpinning that makes all great artists great. The rest of us are those who have made a list of great titles for our books, but haven’t been able to make the books to go along with them! We at Stone Soup hope that you enjoy The Young Visiters. It makes a good story to read aloud, as it’s lots of fun for everybody. Contents Preface by J. M. Barrie 1. Quite a Young Girl 2. Starting Gaily 3. The First Evening 4. Mr. Salteenas Plan 5. The Crystal Palace 6. High Life 7. Bernards Idear 8. A Gay Call 9. A Proposale 10. Preparing for the Fray 11. The Wedding 12. How It Ended Preface by J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan The “owner of the copyright” guarantees that “The Young Visiters” is the unaided effort in fiction of an authoress of nine years. “Effort,” however, is an absurd word to use, as you may see by studying the triumphant countenance of the child herself, which is here reproduced as frontispiece to her sublime work. This is no portrait of a writer who had to burn the oil at midnight (indeed there is documentary evidence that she was hauled off to bed every evening at six): it has an air of careless power; there is a complacency about it that by the severe might perhaps be called smugness. It needed no effort for that face to knock off a masterpiece. It probably represents precisely how she looked when she finished a chapter. When she was actually at work I think the expression was more solemn, with the tongue firmly clenched between the teeth; an unholy rapture showing as she drew near her love chapter. Fellow-craftsmen will see that she is looking forward to this chapter all the time. The manuscript is in pencil in a stout little note book (twopence), and there it has lain for years, for though the authoress was nine when she wrote it she is now a grown woman. It has lain, in lavender as it were, in the dumpy note book, waiting for a publisher to ride that way and rescue it; and here he is at last, not a bit afraid that to this age it may appear “Victorian.” Indeed if its pictures of High Life are accurate (as we cannot doubt, the authoress seems always so sure of her facts) they had a way of going on in those times which is really surprising. Even the grand historical figures were free and easy, such as King Edward, of whom we have perhaps the most human picture ever penned, as he appears at a levée “rather sumshiously,” in a “small but costly crown,” and afterwards slips away to tuck into ices. It would seem in particular that we are oddly wrong in our idea of the young Victorian lady as a person more shy and shrinking than the girl of to-day. The Ethel of this story is a fascinating creature who would have a good time wherever there were a few males, but no longer could she voyage through life quite so jollily without attracting the attention of the censorious. Chaperon seems to be one of the very few good words of which our authoress had never heard. The lady she had grown into, the “owner of the copyright” already referred to, gives me a few particulars of this child she used to be, and is evidently a little scared by her. We should probably all be a little scared (though proud) if that portrait was dumped down in front of us as ours, and we were asked to explain why we once thought so much of ourselves as that. Except for the smirk on her face, all I can learn of her now is that she was one of a small family
Writing Activity: novels in the form of letters, inspired by Jane Austen’s childhood writing
Jane Austen (1775-1817) is one of the the greatest novelists to have written in English. Her novels are still widely read and have been adapted into movies and television series. Jane Austen began writing as a child, and now, finally, some of these childhood writings have been adapted into movies. Whit Stillman’s 2016 movie Love and Friendship borrows its title from the work of the same name, written when Jane Austen was fourteen, but is actually based on Lady Susan, a novel that Austen probably wrote when she was nineteen although it was not published until much later. Both works are “epistolary” novels–novels written in the form of an exchange of letters. This form was common in the eighteenth century as the novel developed into a popular form of writing, and even one of Austen’s more famous works, Sense and Sensibility, began its life as an epistolary novel. Another famous novel of the period, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782) by Pierre Laclos, is also written in the form of letters, and in the end it is the discovery of one of the secret sets of correspondence that creates the climax of the story. That story, too, has been adapted into many theatre and movie versions including a version where the action is transported to a group of teenagers in New York City (Cruel Intentions, 1999). Today, with the resurgence in correspondence through texting and email, the epistolary story is a format that once again makes sense for young writers. One of the things that is exciting about a novel written in the form of letters is the scope it gives for the writer to unwittingly reveal themselves through the style and content of the letters the author has them write. There is no all-knowing narrator in the middle of the action ready to intervene to tell the reader who the characters really are, what the other perspectives might be, or what to look for. The writers of the letters (the characters) have to tell us everything themselves, without seeming aware that they are doing so. The characters who have to tell us, by telling the people they write to, where they are, what has happened, and how they feel–all of which might be different depending on who they are writing to (imagine: even if you are not inventing things, you would probably write a different letter to your best friend about how things are going and what you have been doing at summer camp than you would to your teacher or your grandparents). The skill of the author is, partly, devoted to giving the writers of the letters their own authentic voices, while at the same time making sure they (accidentally) give themselves away in the little hints they drop or the ways they tell their version of a story. It’s a form that you can really have fun with. Writing activity: Create a scenario with at least two characters and a problem, and choose a contemporary form of letter writing as your style: it could be text messages, emails, postcards, greetings cards, notes on school worksheets, or a combination of these and any other forms you can think of. Write at least 5 letters or messages from each of the characters to the others. Each one should reveal something about the action–carry it forward in some way–and reveal more information to the reader about the character, personality, and role in the action of the writer of the ‘letter’. Why not consult our pages on Juvenilia for links to some of the great authors’ juvenilia, and watch some clips of the movies we have mentioned. You can also read some stories published in Stone Soup, such as “Kisses from Cécile” based on a real correspondence; a piece of historical fiction, “Julius’s Gift”, where letters are both part of the action and part of the narrative, and more recent ones like The Red and Blue Thread which incorporate text messaging great effect. The full movie can be rented from Amazon.com and from Curzon Cinemas.
