Reviewed by Holly Brewer, North Carolina State University | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.1

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Reviewed by Holly Brewer, North Carolina State University | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture. By GILLIAN BROWN . (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. viii, 237. $53.50.)

Reviewed by Holly Brewer, North Carolina State University

For more than fifty years, historians have debated whether John Locke's political ideas defined American culture before the Revolution. In the process they have largely rejected Louis Hartz's simplistic articulation of those principles as primarily about property ownership and self-interest. If Lockean principles were mainly about equality and consent, however, as Gillian Brown asserts in The Consent of the Governed, the question of Locke's influence is still resonant. Following the lead of Jay Fliegelman and Samuel F. Pickering, Jr., Brown argues that early American children's literature not only spread Locke's ideas, but in shaping the reader's ability to reason and to choose, they reflected what she identifies as the fundamental ideals in his writing.¹ Brown scrutinizes works such as Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Some Thoughts Concerning Education, arguably more popular and influential in the eighteenth century than his two Treatises on Government and his 1703 translation of Aesop's Fables. She examines didactic literature, including the New England Primer and Goody Two-Shoes, as well as later novels such as The Coquette. This literature, Brown contends, propagated a radicalizing philosophy of consent that originated with Locke's ideas about children's capacity for educated judgment.	1
Applying reader-response theory, Brown argues that the main purpose of books such as the New England Primer was to teach children to reason. The Primer, for example, contained a rhyme and a woodcut image for each letter of the alphabet. "A" is "In Adam's Fall, We sinned all." The image depicts a person reaching for an apple from a tree that has a snake twining up the trunk. While Brown acknowledges that the words constitute "a classic statement of the heritability of the human condition" (p. 36), she argues that the image signifies the opposite. In identifying with Adam the child would face the crucial choice: to eat (and satisfy desire) or not to eat (and avoid ruin). The contradiction between text and image would force the child to analyze. Yet how does Brown know that children read the text this way? Depending on how the book was taught, a child might have dwelled on the hereditary sinfulness explicit in the words instead of focusing on the image of Adam's choice.	2
Although Brown's correlation between Locke and children's didactic literature is problematic (the first edition of the New England Primer antedates Locke's published writings), she convincingly elucidates changes over time in children's lessons. Later editions of the Primer reflected revolutionary sentiments and a transformation in the political education of children. "King Charles the Good / No Man of Blood," which emphasized Charles I's divinity, became "Queens and Kings / Are gaudy things" (p. 57), which equated monarchy itself with frivolous sin. Likewise, whereas the characters in Aesop's Fables remained relatively constant, the morals they taught and the emphasis they placed on reasoning varied over time. In seventeenth-century versions of one story a husbandman shows kindness to a frozen snake by taking it home to warm and feed it, but it bites him and he dies. The moral was clear: do not aid dangerous creatures. Locke's translation of Aesop's Fables told and interpreted the story in a more complex way. Helping the snake was still an error, but it did not lead to death. Instead, the snake begins to hiss, warning the man that it is not friendly. Thus the farmer survives to meditate on ingratitude and justice. "Sometimes it happens, that they do harm to thee, to whom thou hast done good" (p. 72).	. . .

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