Abstract
Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker, Child of the Enlightenment: Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary, trans. Diane Webb, Brill: Leiden, 2009; ix + 553 pp.; 9789004172692, £88.20 (hbk)
Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker’s Child of the Enlightenment is a significant contribution to the already substantial literature on ego-documents in the early-modern world. Originally published in Dutch in 2005, and now available in English, this volume is the first in a series entitled ‘Egodocuments and History’ that will be published by Brill. A similar series by the Austrian publisher Böhlau Verlag that appears under the title ‘Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit’, has reached 19 volumes.
Baggerman and Dekker examine the Netherlands in the late eighteenth century as seen through a diary written by a young Dutchman, Otto van Eck. Born in 1780 in Delft, Otto came from comfortable circumstances. His father Lambert was a businessman and devotee of the Enlightenment, whose interests regularly took him to cities such as Brussels and Paris. Lambert and Henriette, his wife, were equally committed to the inculcation of enlightened values in their children and insisted that Otto enjoy the benefits of a solid education, which included access to books and subjection to the latest pedagogical methods. Otto died very young, in 1798, but thanks to his parents’ fascination with modern pedagogy he left behind a childhood diary that offers a fascinating view into a tumultuous period during which many modern social and intellectual categories, such as childhood, were only beginning to appear.
Baggerman and Dekker’s work is an exceedingly rich document and is, for that reason, difficult to summarize in such a short space. Particularly significant for our appreciation of early-modern European culture and thought are the implications that Otto’s diary has for our understanding of conceptions of public and private. Most of us think of a diary as something intensely personal: one writes to oneself and for oneself. Baggerman and Dekker note, however, that this was not the case in the late eighteenth century, as Otto’s diary was meant for him only in the sense that it was a tool used by others to socialize him. Otto wrote the diary at his parents’ insistence. They, in turn, perused the pages to ensure that their son progressed along the correct path. Indeed, the social control inherent in this arrangement even extended beyond the immediate family, as the diary was made available to visiting friends and relatives. In sum, Otto’s diary was not a solitary memoir, but a social product that emerged from a broader (and emerging) worldview.
As a social product, Otto’s diary also opens a window onto another eighteenth-century issue, the rise of enlightened pedagogy. It is all the rage today to consider the public debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an incubator of radical individualist notions, especially those that we moderns hold most dear. Baggerman and Dekker’s reading of Otto’s diary remind us, however, how disciplinary much of the late enlightenment was, with the discipline, in this case, centring on pedagogy. Here Baggerman and Dekker’s work yields a very interesting result. It is often believed that late eighteenth century pedagogy emerged from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, in which the cantankerous philosophe argued that children should be allowed to grow up naturally, that is, free from discipline. Although Rousseau’s work was important for identifying pedagogy as a public issue, Baggerman and Dekker note that the Dutch imported much of their educational theory from Germany, where an enlightened school of pedagogy called Philanthropinismus had appeared. The Philanthropinisten, including such noted Aufklärer as Johann Heinrich Campe, were influenced heavily by the ideals of the seventeenth-century religious Pietist movement, which cultivated an inward-looking form of Christianity. The Philanthropinisten combined Pietistic inwardness with the eighteenth-century interest in pedagogy to argue that children could become well-adjusted enlightened adults, only after having imbibed the discipline that came with enforced introspection.
Baggerman and Dekker’s work makes clear that the eighteenth-century discovery of childhood as a distinct stage of life was connected to the inculcation of discipline in the Enlightenment’s name. In this sense the title of book is most apt, as it emphasizes how people were raised to be enlightened. The enlightened cultivation of the rational individual and the concomitant extolling of personal freedom were both inherently tied to the bedrock belief that virtue had to be inculcated in the young through adult supervision. In reminding the broader discipline of this fact and by embedding it so deeply in specific practices Baggerman and Dekker have provided a valuable service. The book is highly recommended.