Poor Monkey, The Child in Literature (Signed by Morton Cohen)

Peter Coveney (Morton Cohen interest)

Published by Rockliff, London, 1957

About this Item

First edition, first printing. Hardback in dustwrapper. 22 × 14.5cm, xiv + 297pp. This copy comes from the library of Lewis Carroll scholar Professor Morton N Cohen and has his pencil signature to the ffep. This fascinating book traces the use made of children by writers in their works. Since Lady Macduff's cry to her son on his father's flight "Now, God help thee, poor monkey!" writers have introduced the child to contrast the enormity of man's evil with a standard of innocence. It is only in comparatively modern times, however (from the late eighteenth century onwards) that the child has had any continuous interest for authors, and the book is an analysis of this phenomenon, and an attempt to discover what is being said through the image of the child. Discussing famous children in literature from Rousseau's Emile through Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Lewis Carroll, J M Barrie and Mark Twain, the brings the story down to post-Freudian novelists such as Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D H Lawrence, to show the use of the child in social criticism and finally the second thoughts prompting a desire to depict the real child in the place of the conventional innocent. Condition: The book is in good sound shape but with some marginal annotations made by Professor Cohen. The dustwrapper is good but rubbed to the edges with some surface abrasion.

Seller Inventory # 012831

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Poor Monkey, The Child in Literature (Signed by Morton Cohen)
• Publisher: Rockliff, London
• Publication Date: 1957
• Binding: Hardback
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Good
• Signed: Signed by notable previous own