theatricals in their educational programmes. The linguistic drilling of children was
under way.
The Perspective of a Message Situated between Text and ImageBeyond this convergence between fashion and pedagogy, the power of images was
highlighted, with the same aim of attracting, by the philosopher John Locke in his Some
Thoughts Concerning Education, translated into French in 1695 by Pierre Coste under
the title of Education des Enfants. This power of images, which is crucial in holding
children’s attention, was to be taken into account in the revolutionary system of Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, which is based on a realistic observation of play and the behaviour of
real children: it governs the education of Julie’s children in Eloisa (1761), and doubtless
the reader will remember the intimate scene in which Julie is shown with her children
looking at a collection of pictures, the elder explaining the engravings to his younger
brother (Rousseau 1761/1964:581). This is a symbolic attitude on which the educator in
Emile, ou, de l’Education (translated into English by M.Nugent as Emilius, or an Essay on
Education (1763)), too busy fighting against the damage of the feverish reading of his
childhood, was to maintain a prudent silence, restricting his pupil to the reading of
Robinson Crusoe. (Of course, many editions of that novel were at the time decorated with
splendid plates and thus glorified the pleasures of the imagination as much as the joys
of concrete good behaviour.) In Rousseau’s outlook on the world, pictures are the ideal
channel which allow the child to pass from the world of ‘nature’ to that of ‘culture’.
A picture is what appeared in the ‘window’ of the painter Alberti in the Renaissance or
which burst out fantastically in the ‘lens’ of Nathanël in Hoffmann’s Sandman,
published at the time the kaleidoscope was invented (1816): it is the unexpectedness of
the body which disturbs the vision by the ‘alarming strangeness’ identified by the Freud
in this story (Milner 1982:123). It forms the basis of a more ambiguous narrative than
the discourse which it underlies or unravels. Significantly, its eruption into the culture
of children corresponds to the developments of modern optics at the time when
Comenius was publishing his Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658), which combined text and
illustration, and the scene from Eloisa which we referred to above followed close behind
the improvements made to the telescope by John Dollond in 1757. It is true that Venus,
ascending back to Olympus at the beginning of Book Eight of Fénelon’s The Adventures
of Telemachus already shared a view of our world which can be explained only by the
overturn of the baroque vision through the use of astronomical lenses developed by
Galileo as early as 1609. As a result,
The most innumerable peoples and most powerful armies are only like ants
quarrelling with each other over a blade of grass on this bit of mud. The immortals
laugh about the most serious affairs which agitate weak mortals and which appear
to them to be as children’s games.
Author’s translation, Fénelon 1983:114Through the implicit handling of the astronomical lens, we are present at a subversion of
the adult vision which is treated as a child’s game. We know that the applications of
712 THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE