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Article: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the politics of childhood.
- Article from:
- Victorian Poetry
- Article date:
- December 22, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 West Virginia University Press, University of West Virginia. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Aarmazed that despite her prolonged invalidism and two previous miscariages she was able to bear a child at age forty-three, Elizabeth Barrett Browning viewed her son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning--nicknamed Pen--as something akin to a fairy changeling, and her prolific letters document a remarkably indulgent attitude toward the behaviors and capacities of children. She believed that children should never be forced to study, that they would come to all that is needful in their own time. She admonished her sister Henrietta, herself the mother of a young son, not to rush the boy's studies, for "a child learns most when he plays." (1) Rather reluctantly, she began ...