14. The Reception of Locke’s Ideas in the Eighteenth Century
Pages 144 to 151
Cite this chapter
- BAILLON, Jean-François,
- Baillon, Jean-François.
- Baillon, J.-F.
Cite this chapter
- Baillon, J.-F.
- Baillon, Jean-François.
- BAILLON, Jean-François,
Notes
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[1]
Samuel F. Pickering, Jr., John Locke and Children’s Books, p. 6-7.
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[2]
Jane Collier, An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, edited by Audrey Bilger, Peterborough, Ontario : Broadview Literary Texts, 2003, p. 71.
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[3]
Samuel Johnson, The Rambler n° 148, Saturday, 17 August 1751, in Johnson, Selected Essays, edited by David Womersley, Harmondsworth : Penguin, 2003, p. 247-251.
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[4]
Chambers, Cyclopaedia, 1728. vol. 1, p. 279, cité in Roy Porter, Enlightenment : Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, Harmondsworth : The Penguin Press, 2000, p. 342.
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[5]
Samuel Heathcote to Locke, 25 May 1694, Corr., vol. 5, p. 55.
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[6]
Kenneth MacLean. John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century, New York : Russell and Russell, 1962, p. 1.
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[7]
Samuel Pickering, Jr., op. cit., p. 80-83.
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[8]
Plumb, op. cit., p. 301-304.
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[9]
J. W. Ashley Smith, The Birth of Modern Education. The Contribution of the Dissenting Academies 1600-1800, London : Independent Press, 1954, p. 144-145.
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[10]
Ashley Smith, op. cit., p. 146-148. See also J. J. Chambliss, “John Locke and Isaac Watts : Understanding as Conduct”, in Chambliss, Educational Theory as Theory of Conduct. From Aristotle to Dewey, Albany : State University of New York Press, 1987, p. 71-85.
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[11]
Ashley Smith, op. cit., p. 174.
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[12]
Roy Porter, Enlightenment, p. 342-343.
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[13]
Lord Chesterfield, Letters, edited by David Roberts, Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 116.
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[14]
Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children, p. 120.
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[15]
René Pomeau, L’Europe des Lumières. Cosmopolitisme et unité européenne au XVIIIe siècle, Paris : Hachette-Pluriel, 1995, p. 85-119.
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[16]
Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment. Philosopy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, New York and Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 527.
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[17]
“John Locke is often called the Enlightenment’s progenitor. (…) Locke is not the greatest of the Enlightenment’s forefathers” (Rensoned Freedom, p. 1).
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[18]
Margaret Ezell, “John Locke’s Images of Childhood”, Critical Assessments, p. 232 ; Geraint Parry, “Education Can Do All”, in Norman Géras et Robert Wokler, ed., Enlightenment and Modernity, Basingstoke and London : Macmillan, 2000, p. 25-49.
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[19]
Nina Reicyn, La Pédagogie de John Locke, p. 183.
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[20]
Cf. Julia Simon, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Children”, in Susan M. Turner et Gareth B. Matthews. ed., The Philosopher’s Child. Critical Essays in the Western Tradition. Rochester, New York : University of Rochester Press, 1998, p. 109-110.
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[21]
Frederick C. Beiser. “A Romantic Education : The Concept of Bildung in early German Romanticism”, in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., Philosophers on Education : New Historical Perspectives, London and New York : Routledge, 2003 [1998], p. 284-299.
Locke’s educational théories were echoed in the pages of many literary masterpieces of the eighteenth century, from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) through Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767). In Richardson’s novel, the heroine, Pamela Andrews, on the advice of Mr. B., reads Locke’s Thoughts as a manual on child-training, a “Directory”, which perhaps gives us a clue about the concrète réception of the text. Pamela, eager to improve her son Billy’s opportunities, writes letter after letter to Mr. B., praising Locke’s “excellent Book”. Sometimes the literary influence of Locke’s philosophy of éducation took the shape of satire, as in Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753). In chapter III of the first part of that very entertaining book, Collier gives advice to parents in a way that both mimicks and subverts Locke’s serious calls to virtue and loving care. Starting from the premise that the end of éducation is to make sure that children will be “a torment to themselves if they live, and a plague to all your acquaintance”, she advises against severity to them on the grounds that although “when carried to excess”, it may “render the lives of those children very miserable”, yet it is by no means the best method of tormenting. However, if parents insist on following it, then she advises “never to strike or whip a child, but when you are angry, and in a violent passion with that child; nor ever let this correction come for lying, obstinacy, or disobedience, in the child, but for having torn or dirted her white frock, if it be a girl; or for having accidentally broke a china cup at play; or an…
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